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.
It is almost four years since I last visited Statistics
New Zealand (http://www.stats.govt.nz/) and it
appears that I have missed out on at least one major revamp of their site. The current version is fixed width, whereas the
one I missed (still currently accessible from the new front page) is variable. The new
home page is more succinct – extremely quick to load (the large graphic present at my
last review has, thankfully, been removed) and very customer focussed. How many of my
readers have ever thought about helping the users by giving them a guide to where the
areas they were used to visiting could be found on the new organisation of a site? It is
pleasing to see that all the text on pages can be made larger for the visually impaired.
Clearly much research has gone into the design and
structure of the home page – with a result that most of us should be trying to
emulate. The roll-over change for all of the links is very clear and similar in all of the
navigation areas. A very minor point – the text of the left-hand navigation links is
in a serif typeface unlike the rest. The centre section of the home page gives access to
all releases, past as well as the latest: one minor issue here is the colour used in the
Release Calendar for the titles of the releases – they are not hyperlinked (even for
past months?) but are coloured blue. If the intention is not to hyperlink, do not use the
hyperlink colour!
The top right has the latest key figures – and
limited to just 5. That reminds me of the story when a President of the European
Commission wanted just 5 indicators to represent the social state of the EU: finding the
appropriate 5 takes much more time than providing 20 or 200. Below this section are some
quick-links. The first goes to the top 20 statistics – and each one of the portrayed
panels contains the data, the time period and a link to a release called ‘HOTP’
– Hot Off The Press: these documents appear to be much more user-friendly than many I
have seen, without vast arrays of data in the documents though the data can be accessed
through a link (possibly with one too many steps). Indeed, each of the Hot Off The Press
releases has five elements: a media release, highlights, commentary, technical notes and
associated tables (some, additionally, have analytical tables). Such a range covers all
the foreseeable requirements of the different levels of users.
The left hand navigation contains the links to the vast
information resource of the office as well as the organisation information. Most of the
telephone numbers in the contacts section are in international format – though not
all. The clear hierarchical structure of the site through the vast array of information is
commendable. The use of underlined blue text for links does not work too well when you
have pages of table links (e.g. on the people and Society / Education / Census
publication).
The Census of Population and Dwellings is a simple
front-end for the users of the information and one can quickly get either area or subject
profiles. The cognoscenti can also go further and access the tables of data and all the
technical material – all from a relatively simple front page. Another user-friendly
front-end allows the users to find table of data from the census that have already been
prepared – in Excel or ‘Tablebuilder’ format: the latter format allows easy
manipulation and expansion of the tables.
This site has vastly improved since my last visit
– with the different types of user being easily catered for. The simplification of
the home page and other lead pages within the site must have taken a significant amount of
effort that has been amply rewarded by the result. This site moves to the top of my
recommended list for all seeking ideas for improvement in their own sites.
This
review was undertaken using Internet Explorer version 5.50 on 9 January 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