Eating Disorder Services
[July 2003] Eating Disorder Services provide services to the Greater Wellington region. They offer a range of services for people with eating disorders, their friends and family, schools, universities, community groups and healthcare professionals.
The website is extremely informative, with plenty of information about eating disorders for those who believe they may have such a disorder as well as those around them and healthcare professionals, with even a section for students doing assignments.
The site takes an interesting and useful approach to navigation. On the left-hand side of the page is a fly-out style menu which works well on Internet Explorer 5.50 (PC) and seems to work as designed in Mozilla and Safari. However, it misbehaves in Internet Explorer 5.2.3 (Mac OS X) and isn't visible at all in Opera (v6.0 for Mac OS X). Fortunately alternative Navigation is available via text links at the bottom of each page, both for the whole site and for each section.
While that text-only navigation could be improved by marking out where the visitor is in some way and by separating the rows a little more widely it does compensate for the problems with the left-hand navigation.
Providing text-only navigation also accords with accessibility recommendations, and here we see why those recommendations exist. The problems mentioned above are one aspect. Another is the increasing popularity of fly-out menus, such as that used on this site where the visitor needs great dexterity with a mouse to catch an ever-changing and moving target. As one who has used computers for 20 years now and who currently spends a good 10 hours each day at a computer I would say that menus such as these are one of my most pet hates because of their difficulty in use.
It's pleasing to see that the huge amount of information available at this site is available both as web pages and as downloadable (and presumably printable) PDFs. Link text is well-chosen, though on pages such as Common Questions the links to the PDFs should really include an identifying word. For example pdf 75Kb and pdf 66Kb would be better as: risk pdf 75Kb and Anorexia_Criteria_pdf 66Kb. It's excellent though to see that pdf sizes are given.
On the Recommended Reading page the NZ flags are a nice touch to mark out the NZ books. The alt text for the flags is also a sensible "Written in New Zealand".
Summary: Text is straightforward, links are clear. Navigation makes sense and there's a Search facility which seems to work well. All in all this is a site which provides a lot of information in a clear and effective manner.
[http://www.eatingdisorders.org.nz/]