D&C Lug - Home Page
Devon & Cornwall Linux Users' Group

[ Date Index ][ Thread Index ]
[ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

[LUG] Technical observations on www.cornwall.gov.uk




I have had a look at the website www.cornwall.gov.uk and it has several
issues which frustrate me.

First and for most it has several errors, which cause it to render badly
on browsers such as Netscape 6.x and Mozilla.

Check it for compliance with this link:
http://makeashorterlink.com/?F1B221921

I suggest you come up with a publishing system not based on the poor
Frontpage product.

The general way the HTML is written is poor. You should not being using
tables all the time to set the text. Paragraphs should be simply
encapsulated in <p> tags and be positioned with CSS. Tables of for
tabulated data, and this website has abused HTML design. 

The whole technical implementation regarding you server software is also
disappointing. As a citizen of Cornwall, it is not re-assuring that you
are running Microsoft IIS software, full of security and performance
problems. A professional implementation is done using FREE opensource
products such as Apache which is distributed in packages such as Suse or
debian.

Another sign of a bad web design is how you often how text as images.
For example with the navtop.jpg. Most of Cornwall has a very poor
Internet connection, while you use bandwidth costly images where they
can simply transmitted as HTML (as WWW intended!) marked up or decorated
with CSS.

You are using an old version of HTML where the font sizes are explicitly
set. This is not good, as devices for the hard of seeing have trouble
resizing it to a readable size. Simply do not fix this, leave text to
marked up by browser settings. Use HTML4 or rather XHTML.

From a usability standpoint the front www.cornwall.gov.uk is overloaded
with links. Categorize them. Use logical structure. h1 -> h2 -> h3 -> h4
See www.useit.com for some more advice.

Your copyright page is a tad disappointing, but I will not engage in an
argument over that. Just remember that the WWW was designed for sharing
and discerning information. 

Contact me and I would be glad to help Cornwall slide into the 21st
century. 

Regards,
-Kai Hendry
from Cardinham

--
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the
message body to unsubscribe.


Lynx friendly