NPPR.ie - A Roadmap For Future Government Sites

22 Feb 2010

Finally a government website that meets our approval!

A big bravo to the NPPR.ie website team who won this years eGovernment Overall Ireland award on the 19th of this month. Having seen the website, and helped someone through the process I was really impressed.

You can visit the website online at:
www.nppr.ie

Related article:
http://short.ie/4zhz3a

Accessibility

Something that has been missing from many government websites, yet constantly recommended by government and EU directives on disability and accessibility, the NPPR website actually makes quite a decent stab at trying to keep everything as usable as possible. Disable features helps ensure the NPPR website is accessible to all, however I would still be concerned for the lack of acknowledgment of the importance of W3C standards (http://short.ie/73d9zb). None the less, a step in the right direction as far as visual accessibility goes. There are a few niggly exceptions to this with images and ALT tags, but overall, it is a major step up for screen reader users and mobile browsers over other government sites.

 

Design and Layout.

The one thing that blows you away about NPPR has to be the attention to detail of the design. The layout and design of the website is refreshingly clean and crisp for a government website, with the visual appeal of a social networking website for the user, with WEB 2.0 design features, it resembles Twitter more than a state agency, which is a really good thing. Buttons and check boxes take a lot of the possible confusion out of filling potentially cumbersome documents. One point I would raise is, how relevant the design is to the purpose of what the NPPR actually does!

 

Reliability

Generally with government websites you only really find out how reliable they are when something goes very wrong and is picked up on by the media. Smith and Wise conducted a simple multiple request test (we loaded one of the query pages, 30 times at once). We also cross browser tested the website. The results were pleasantly surprisingly - not a single timeout or aspx related error. The government nearly always uses high quality server suppliers in our experience of researching / dealing with agencies and suppliers, therefore we can conclude, coupled with the brute force / cross browser tests, that NPPR.ie probably is a fairly reliable website.

 

Content

It's pretty much what you see is what you get, which when it comes to something to do with taxation, the government or law is probably a really good thing. Everything you need is there, disclaimers are present as recommended, and the FAQ section is very comprehensive.

 

Overall

It would be great if NPPR could have ensured their pages could validate. Also the design, despite being beautifully crafted, does at times, make you wonder what the website is really about. Overall, if we had designed the site, we would be very proud of our work all in all.

 

Byron Smith
Smith and Wise

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