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.
I wanted a new country in Africa for this month’s
visit and tried Algeria first: this site (http://www.ons.dz
) is only in French but took so long to open all the graphics and flash items on the home
page that I gave up. Even the capitals ‘ONS’ in the title are animated graphics
– which all add to the download time.
My next visit was to the Central Bureau of Statistics
in Kenya (http://www.cbs.go.ke/ ). After a slight
pause the home page began to appear: then followed the slow delivery of more than 20 GIF
files. Once delivered the home page is well structured with clear navigation at the top of
the page. This is a very interesting use of the drop-down roll-over navigation: for both
the Press Releases and Publications only the last few issues are given with a link for
‘more’. The ‘more’ on Press Releases was not active at the time of the
review but that on Publications was – and brought a single HTML page, 18 screens in
length, listing the details of publications together with a list of forthcoming
publications. This could be improved in timely delivery of the information if some
additional hierarchical screens are introduced. The colour of the navigation links is
confusing: some of the orange text is not linked and the ‘Other publications by the
CBS’ just goes to the same place as the ‘Publications’ in the top menu.
The centre of the home page records the latest
information releases – appropriately summarised for the user. The archive of the
consumer price index is new but will soon fill a page, again requiring some more
hierarchical pages. Keep 12 months releases here and links to other years would be a
suggestion. It is always tempting to display or link to as much as possible: think how
much the user has to read or scroll to find the information required. File naming needs
attention for operating the site (CPI200407 is better than CPI072004 because it will sort
better).
Kenya in Figures, a graphic link on the right of the
home page gives access to the PDF file of the booklet. The opening design is good and some
rounding of the first table is useful. However data presentation is inconsistent (some
data centred in columns) and the charts are shown in three dimensions instead of two
making them more difficult to interpret. Some of the other links on the right are to PDF
files and two to PowerPoint files: the Economic Survey file is over 1 Mb – and no
size is given by the link to warn the unwary user; further, this is only 28 slides of text
including one map – and should be reduced in size, if not zipped; removing the map
reduces the size of the file to 138 Kb!
The link to the summary census results goes to an HTML
page with hyperlinks at the top to the relevant tables. This use of bookmarks could easily
be extended to other areas on the web site – to great advantage to the user.
The top navigation gives quick links through to the
themes of statistics – and to the relevant tables within themes. Overall this site is
obviously developing along user-friendly lines and, with some further work on data
presentation, download file size and structure, will become a model.
Please
send and comments and suggestions for sites to review to
Ed.Swires-Hennessy@lgdu-wales.gov.uk