Review of Communications, Science and Technology website

Website Overview

Ministry of Communications, Science and Technology - Botswana

This website spots the classic bluish theme, with National coat of arms, and Botswana flag being the most prominent features of the site which is a factor I highlighted in my previous review.

Layout

No surprises here that the website is laid out using HTML tables which of course is (BAD) but despite the tables, the layout is nice and clean without too many unnecessary distracting features. But for the same reasons mentioned in my previous post tables are not meant for layout due to accessibility issues. As per the W3C recommendations :

• Use style sheets to control layout and presentation. [Priority 2]
• Do not use tables for layout unless the table makes sense when linearized. Otherwise, if the table does not make sense, provide an alternative equivalent (which may be a linearized version). [Priority 2] (Source : W3C Note 6, CSS Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0)

It also appears the webmaster forgot to change the logo in the template. That has been showing since the website was published in 2006 and it makes the website look a bit amateurish and unprofessional.

Navigation

The navigation is not this site’s best feature and does not seem to be well thought out to be honest. For instance,

• left column menu which in many cases should either be a second level or first level navigation menu depending on the design, comprise of just outgoing links. Why is this bad? Because as a webmaster, you want to keep people in your website as long as possible rather than sending them off immediately when they land on your website with outgoing links.
• the use of Javascript drop-down menu with deep nesting and without alternatives in cases where users have disabled Javascript [yes there are people who disable JS for 'secutiry reasons']
• under the “About MCST”->Executive Profiles; only the minister’s quasi-professional profile is included; not too sure whether the minister is the only one with an “executive profile” in the whole ministry.

The next section will focus on Content and some other less Aesthetic features of the site.

Content

• Compared with the MTI website, MCST website’s content is not properly laid out nor is there a smooth transition between different content pages. Navigation between different pages “feels” like browsing through disparate pages which are not at all related. Except for the layout and theme there is no inter-linking of the content at all.
• Pagination could have been used in some pages like this one but who knows that content might no longer even be accurate.
• Orphaned content pages like the Featured Publications are scattered all over the website, the page just sits there and at the bottom of that page the text that says “For more information about this book please visit call or visit on of our Bookshops.” does not provide the phone number to call nor even an indication as to where these “bookshops” are.
• Broken Links like RIPCO and Visit Botswana links, there is lots of free tools that validate links out there including the W3C’s Link Checker.
• Empty Contact Us, Classifieds and Disclaimer pages.

Typography

Typography is to do with the presentation and arrangement of content and I must say the MCST web designer did it very well. The default font size, line-height and letter spacing, content aggregation are very easy on the eyes. Correct use of space and sizes as well as colors.

Well done to the web designer in this regard.

Markup

The markup in most pages including the home page cannot be validated due to some invalid characters which do not follow the content encoding declared in the pages headers See what I’m talking about?

Lack of proper title tags per page results in totally unhelpful search engine results page. As the figure below shows, pretty much every page is titled “Welcome to the Dailynews Online”; why not use proper title tags corresponding to the stories in those pages?

Updates

The only part of the website which seems to have had any updates though irregularly is the Daily News section which requires a separate review by itself. The rest of the website’s content seems to have been last modified sometimes in August of 2006.

Verdict

• Swap the departmental menu on the right column with the external links on the left column.
• remove the irrelevant “logo” image or add the one relevant to MCST.
• Validate all links both outgoing and internal to make sure none is broken.
• Validate the HTML and CSS using W3C Validators.
• Do away with tables for layout, USE CSS FOR LAYOUT; tables are NOT meant for layout they are meant for tabular data. This cannot be over-emphasised.

The website itself needs a makeover, it seems abandoned as it is at the moment, no regular updates which is a bit disappointing to say the least considering that this is the ministry which should be the be it all in setting the pace and example for the others, considering that in their website it says explicitly that one of their aims and objectives is e-government. It’s hard to see how the ministry can achieve that if their website does not even have a working contact us page.

Nevertheless, the presence of a website is a step in the right direction I guess.

Don’t forget to leave leave me a comment whether you disagree or agree with the above review.

Till next time !