I am moved to wax lyrical about a website I have just visited – and no, it is not one of mine. It is not even coded in my ‘platform of choice’ WordPress, but in Drupal. Never-the-less, I was so impressed that I wanted to share what I liked about it. (I will let you know the URL at the end.) I thought it was a brilliant website for three simple reasons:
- Functionality – this website really did what it set out to do. I went there for a particular purpose, and it helped my get what I wanted – specific information and assistance – with the minimum of fuss. There were no layers of sub menus to trawl through and no confusing clutter.
- Technically slick. No nasty Flash (a whole article could be dedicated to why I hate Flash) but beautiful jQuery animations that were smooth and sexy and back to point 1 – functional. No animations were there just for window dressing. They helped assist the visitor through the process.
- Designed by angels. Loved the colour scheme and the layout. Very pleasing on the eye. While this is not the number one criteria it usually happens that if a site has the first 2 points right they get this one horribly wrong and if they get this one right the others are not in attendance.
Other nice touches were that there was an accessibility page which gave instructions to people without a mouse – although how they would navigate to that page is unclear. The website could be translated into other languages also.
There was no website development company listed as the site was created by a goverment department – possibly the most surprising thing. And the site? www.referendum.org.nz
