Association for Supported Employment in New Zealand
[April 2003] This group provides a high profile forum for the promotion, establishment and development of Supported Employment Services for people with disabilities in New Zealand, through information, networking, research and policy advocacy.
With graphics off this website makes an immediate and effective impression. You can instantly see how to navigate, and the text is clear and quite readable. Turning off graphics is one good way to check if the site will work for blind visitors and for those on slow connections or devices such as handhelds or cellphones.
The Home Page establishes a chatty and informative tone. It's well-structured using headings effectively (and correctly) to make the text easily scannable. It's concise too, making it very readable. Writing effectively for the web demands concise, readable, structured text.
Areas of the site include Upcoming Events, Hot topics, Work in Progress , Membership information, Bulletin Board, FAQ's , Contact , Links. It's confusing though that the navigation removes the link for the current page. This means that the navigation bar is constantly changing - items move from their place and you can't quickly check there to see which page you're on. A better strategy is to leave the link in place but to deactivate it and change its appearance a little.
FAQs has plenty of information about employing people with disabilities. The Contact and Links pages are very informative and useful. The Links have a brief explanation attached. Contacts lists information about the Board members as well as the main office. In one case though there might be a little too much information: it's advisable to be cautious when listing information for private addresses on a website.
Hot Topics and Work in Progress take you to links to PDFs. Adding dates to summaries and letting site visitors know how big the PDFs are would make it easier for people to navigate and to choose whether and when to download files.
In the Providers section the use of a map linking to a directory will present a problem for some people visiting the website. "Click on your location on the map below to find the ASENZ provider/s in your area" is no help if you don't have access to images. I was unable to click on anything to get the list of providers. Although this is a common oversight, it's a pretty serious problem that needs to be fixed. This can be quickly and easily done by also providing a set of text links. Even providing the directory list as a downloadable text file would be helpful.
Summary: this site has potential and is offering valuable information to a sector where that information is very much needed. The language on the site is good: chatty and informative, but the site design would be improved with some attention to detail.
[http://www.asenz.org.nz]