Surfing with Ed
on the Internet…
by Ed
Swires-Hennessy, National Assembly for Wales
Ed continues
his appraisals of different national Web Sites to stimulate use of the Internet, share
best practice and encourage debate.
This
month, I travel halfway around the world to review the site for the National Statistical
Office of Papua New Guinea. (http://www.nso.gov.pg/)
This is a site entirely in English.
The
homepage loaded rather slowly – largely due to it being almost entirely pictorial. An
animation in the top right hand corner this loads quickly and is not too obtrusive, but
the fast moving animated text at the bottom of the screen is unnecessary and off-putting.
The links on the top are rollover buttons so there is no way of telling which pages you
have already visited, however they are easy to use and use contrasting colours. There is
also a set of normal text links at the bottom of pages – but not on the home page.
The
About NSO page contains a large amount of information about the National Statistical
Office including links to another three pages, each describing the work of specific
sections. These three links are duplicates of those contained in the navigation bar at the
top of each page and therefore not necessary in the body of the text. The Contact and
Related Links page, rather confusingly, has two separate buttons linking to it. The
Contacts button is always highlighted when you view this page regardless of which of the
two available buttons is used to display it. On the homepage there are what appears to be
a pair of links to “Contacts” and “Other Useful Links” at the bottom
of the page, which do nothing. Further, the Publication Subscription page has a link to an
order form – although the link does not work.
The
2000 Census has a mini-site devoted to. The top of the page has links from buttons with
text beside them. However, there is no linking facility from the text, which is where many
people would expect to link from. The site contains very comprehensive information about
the census, the need for it, and the way it was carried out. These pages have good
navigation on the side to link down through the document but could have been improved by
links back to the top in places other than the bottom of the page.
On
the third page “Census Operational Plans”, without any mention of it anywhere
else, some basic population data from the 1990 census is given at the bottom of the page.
This would have been better if it were on a separate page with better links. The title for
these data is placed at the bottom of the text and is still inside the text box. This
could have been improved by being in a separate section, even if it wasn’t on a new
page. The first table is well laid out, however the growth rate figures (which I assume
are in per cent) should be stated as such. The second table could have been improved by
adding in borders like the first table and putting all the section headings in the same
row. At the bottom of the page, there is a 3-D exploded pie chart. Whilst this is very
nice graphically, it is a misleading form of graph to use as it makes the front items look
bigger than they actually are, and the back items conversely smaller.
Overall,
the site is of a reasonable standard but a few minor changes could greatly improve things.
The major omission, however, is the sheer lack of data. It’s all very well, and very
useful, to find out about what they do, but some more published data would be nice. Do all the links on your sites work as you would
expect them to? And what about links on sites
you visit? If not, do tell someone - and help improve the sites.
This
review was undertaken using Internet Explorer version 5.0 on 22 October at 10.00 hrs GMT
using a high-speed link through Super JANet on a Pentium III 333MHz machine.
Please
send and comments and suggestions for sites to review to
Ed.Swires-Hennessy@wales.gsi.gov.uk
Happy
surfing ………….
This
and previous reviews together with web usability guidelines can be accessed through
http://www.surfingwithed.org.uk/