by Ed Swires-Hennessy, Local Government Data Unit - Wales
Ed continues his appraisals of different national Web Sites to stimulate use of the Internet, share best practice and encourage debate.
A personal call this week was about the country of
Romania – and so I chose to investigate progress there with statistics on the web.
The previous review of Romania in January 2000 was to a very different site. The new site
(http://www.insse.ro/indexe.htm ) is much
crisper with a clean and uncluttered home page: at the time of visit, just six press
notices and three key areas in the main body with a left-hand navigation to the rest of
the site.
I started by looking at the first Press Release shown,
Trends in the Evolution of Economic Activity (31.01.04), where the first table does not
contain figures but directional arrows! The advantage to the user was that the PDF file
opened in the right-hand side of the page – retaining the main navigation of the
site. The second press notice call returned an HTTP 404 error – not found. The third,
on the Consumer Price Index, has just been rebased to December 2003 – but the index
for the first month shown, October 1990, is 230056.2: which implies that it is much
cheaper to live in Romania now.
My second search is for the population figure. In the
last review I sought the figure from the Yearbook – which all had to be downloaded as
a PDF file before the first table could be accessed. Now the chapters of the book are in
ZIPed PDF files. The population chapter is 1.22 Mb – and the server has a slow link
because the file promised to take over 10 minutes at 2 Kb per second! I gave up. I
followed the left-hand link to Statistical Indicators and discovered these were
conveniently split into economic and social indicators. Following Social Indicators for
2002, I soon found population: the whole page took several minutes to load as the
inclusion of thumbnail charts (size up to 36 Kb each) really slowed delivery. I followed
the link to the population chart – and was presented with both a chart and a summary
table (where the numbers had been centred in the columns!). The only navigation on the
chart page was to the home page – unlike the presentation of the press notice.
A small dip into the Census presentation opened three
new windows before I got any data – in Romanian.
The section on methodology is quite detailed – but
the layperson would have some difficulties: in the section on prices, the reader is
confronted with Laspeyres, geometric means and ‘junction coefficients’. What’s New contains a list of publications
and I am not clear why this is different from yearly publications part of the Catalogue
– which is very poorly presented: the appear on one bookmarked page that again took
minutes to load because of the many large images (whose size needs drastically reducing).
From this page I returned to the home page , via the catalogue page and the
‘home’ symbol, to find myself in a new window!
Overall the site is much improved since the last visit
but not too user-friendly: it must be very slow for those on a dial-up link and even I
gave up on a relatively small download. Some attention needs to be given to data
presentation and navigation in some parts of the site.
This
review was undertaken using Internet Explorer version 5.50 on 6 February 2004 at 08.30 hrs
GMT using a 2 Mbit link to the Internet on a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz machine.
Please
send and comments and suggestions for sites to review to