Manawa
[February 2003] Manawa (mangrove) is a website for people and groups working for the environment in the Auckland region. Its aim is to build an online community of conservation and environment groups to help strengthen and coordinate their work.
The site offers ready access to a Conservation Calendar, Shared Documents, Forums and Member Organisations. There's plenty of News available on the front page, together with links to a large categorised list of Member Organisations.
Shared Documents offers a list of interesting-looking Microsoft Word or PDF files with a paragraph of explanation to help you decide whether the document will be of use to you. Topics include funding, carwashes, gardens, beaches and the Walking Bus. The utility could be increased though by adding the filesize to the descriptions in the list. When I'm downloading a file I like to know whether I'm in for a two-second or a two-minute (or even a 20 minute) wait. Also in this age of viruses it would be reassuring to see a statement about whether the files had been virus-checked.
The Forums are a web-based discussion area. There is potential here for interested people to participate in public discussions, though it doesn't seem very active at the time of visiting. Web-based discussion forums seem to be more popular in theory than in practice.
The "Week's Events" works well - follow a link and you find a useful and clear paragraph about the event listed. Click on a marked day on the month's calendar and you find what's on for that day. You can also just pick a date from the "jump list" and go straight to an events list for that date.
The site includes a FAQ area and a feedback form (listed under More Links on the left). It's a little confusing though that the Resource Library turns out to be the same as the Shared Documents. Perhaps these two seemingly different links could be given the same name.
There is also a Toolbox which requires a login. Register for the site (free) and you gain the ability to personalise your use of the site.
Visiting Manawa with images off instantly showed up the lack of alt attributes. This is particularly devastating for the Calendar which simply shows up as a block of anonymous squares. Alternate text for images is a fundamental requirement for any web page and this failing clearly makes the site much less usable for some users.
Manawa blends fresh greens at left and top of each page, but sensibly presents the main information as black text on an off- white background. The site design is straightforward and easy to follow, except for the slight confusion of links noted above. Apart from those small points though this is an attractive and useful site for those working with the environment.
http://www.manawa.org.nz/