What's Up
[September 2003] What's Up is a free, national telephone counselling service for New Zealanders aged 5 to 18 years. The service operates seven days a week from noon to midnight. Paid, trained and closely supervised professional counsellors answer the telephones.
This site is targeted to adults but will also have some appeal to younger people. Linked from the front page is the Wassup Rap MP3 — an enjoyable Rap about the What's Up site. MP3 is a good choice for sound files as many computers these days can play it without difficulty and the file size is small while quality is good. It's great that visitors can choose whether or not to play the Rap.
The front page also offers a couple of brief news items, helping to keep content fresh. You can Read More than the initial sentence at the link provided. This is a popular and useful technique but does offer an accessibility problem because in each case the link text is the same ("Read More") but the target (the address of the "more") is different. For those who use a list of links out of context this means simply a choice between "Read More", "Read More", "Read More" for example. More useful would be link text such as: "Phone Success", "Services", "Youth Ambassador".
It's excellent to see that suitable alt text is available for the images. Finding your way around is clear and easy, with main navigation across the top and navigation within each topic down the left. Pages load quickly and the cartoon characters add some lift to the pages. It's pleasing to see these four characters reflect various ethnicities, genders and types.
The Links and Resources section offers some well-chosen links and a number of PDFs. While there's a useful link to download Acrobat Reader it would also be handy to know how big each PDF is. Archived newsletters are also available as PDFs with a quick summary of contents visible on the page. This makes choosing a newsletter easy.
Overall this is a good-looking and very usable site, although the use of pale grey text on some pages may cause difficulty for some readers. Mainly though, the text is black or bold dark blue on white and very easy on the eyes.
Fixing the text size in pixels may cause problems for some users. While most Mac users can easily resize such text some users of Windows Internet Explorer will be unable to change the size. As the text is at the smaller end of ordinary sizes there may well be some users who wish to increase it.
Summary: This appealing and attractive site brings good information in an attractive format.
[http://www.whatsup.co.nz/]