The website assigned to our group was a ‘government department’ website, so we have chosen to the the Ministry of Justice website. This document is a summary of what our group has currently and collectively thought about the Ministry of Justice website. The writing in this summary report is not considered final, and is under discussion and refinement by the group. Topics covered in the report include the target audience and website appeal to the target audience, page layout, browser compatibility, navigation, use of colour and graphics, multimedia, content presentation, functionality, and accessibility.
The Ministry of Justice website defines the website to “deliver court and tribunal …show more content…
It, however, doesn 't have a last update section, which as a government department it 's fairly important to include as people go there for legal information and outdated information could lead to confusion.
The page layout is consistent with basic design principles. The website is well laid out in a grid design, and appropriate use of white space gives separation between each individual element. The header and navigation occupy less than a fourth of the web page at 1024x768 resolutions, which is a good design standard. There is also good balance of text, graphics used, and white space on the web pages, and there is a basic colour palette used to help with contrast on the website for easy viewing of content on the website.
The load time of this website is really slow. According to research the normal time someone would expect for a page to load would be from two to three seconds. This page took 11 seconds in dial-up and in normal broadband speed it took up to five seconds. This could be due to the number of photos in the website.
There is no reference to a view port meta tag to display the website in smartphones or other small screen devices. There is, however, reference to a software product called “Plone”, which is a development environment for content …show more content…
However, the total size of all graphics amounts to 176 KB, the largest being 32.3 KB, with a size of 206 pixels tall by 100 pixels wide. Also, alternative text has been provided to every major graphic that is displayed on the website, which helps the websites accessibility for users as graphics without an alternative text can become a barrier for blind users using the website (Bigham , Kaminsky, Ladner, Danielsson & Hempton, 2006), and W3C recommend the use of alternative text to provide text to non-text content for disabled users. Despite there being animated images loaded to the browser, they are not displayed on the website.
No multimedia is used except for a webpage which uses an google maps API to help list the locations of the courts in New Zealand. The webpage provides a textbox to type in, which is linked to google maps. The map provides the address of a chosen court, and can provide directions to the court by using the google maps API.
Content is presented in a simple and consistent way. Arial and Times New Roman (with similar variants for browsers which do not support these) are the only fonts used on the website, both of which are widely supported and easy to read. These fonts, as well as their colours and sizes, are used consistently throughout the