The Family Help Trust
[May 2003] The Family Help Trust operates child abuse-prevention services for high-risk families in Christchurch, New Zealand. It confronts the causes of family dysfunction and provides client families with the skills they need to improve their lives, and those of their children.
This fast-loading and attractive site contains plenty of well-written, helpful information.
Visitors can find out about the Background and Services of the Trust, read or download a couple of reports, find information about making donations or offering other help, and see news and job vacancies. Where you can download information it's clearly marked with an indication of size and download time. These days it can also be a good idea to include information about virus checks.
Plenty of contact information is on a separate web page, together with a form for those who prefer that. The Contact form carried a statement: "*Fields highlighted by this colour require an entry". While this is helpful information if a visitor had only a greyscale display they might not know which fields were required. In this case the fields also have an * which is an excellent indicator, but the statement could have mentioned the asterisk as well as the colour.
It was very pleasing to see that the site worked well for those who can't access the images, and each page also included a link to a "printer-friendly" version. If you choose a printer-friendly page though you have to return to the original page in order to navigate to another section.
These days it's possible to set up a stylesheet to allow printing without having to have a separate page, and in that case the visitor doesn't lose the navigation or any other content, even if such items don't appear in print. This would be a worthwhile option for the Family Trust to explore as it also reduces the workload in maintaining the site.
It's very pleasing to note that sensible alternate text is used for the images, but it's a little disappointing that each page uses the same Title. As the Title is what's stored when you Bookmark a page (add it to your Favourites) it's useful to have a precise title which differs for each page. What's more, search engines lay quite some weight on page titles so you can boost your rankings by using carefully chosen keywords in that area.
The News page seems to be frequently updated and offers links to reports in other media as well as 'in-house" news.
Link text (the words you click on for a link) is generally well-chosen with a couple of lapses into "Click here". It's important to ensure that the link is on high-content words as this aids some people with disabilities as well as increasing search engine rankings. For example in this section: "The Trust runs several fund-raising events each year. Click here to read about these events" the link was on "Click here" but would have been more effective on "fund-raising events".
Summary: This is a very pleasing, fast-loading and informative site. The language is clear and the appearance attractive.
[http://www.familyhelptrust.org.nz/]