Darebin libraries website
Jun 13, 04:35 PMHaving experienced many online offerings from local governments and local councils in the past, as well as having worked for a few, I had pretty much resigned myself to accepting that most are going to be rubbish in terms of antiquated code using tables for layout and inline styles, bad interface design, little or no regard for usability or accessibility and, more often than not containing outdated content.
Whatever the reasons for this, be it that the website is perhaps considered a low priority, that there’s no dedicated resource allocated to the website or that it’s simply too hard to get people to agree to a redesign, the sites’ users seem destined to lose-out.
This has always amazed and concerned me considering the broad, diverse user base that these organisations must have, and the importance of the content to a lot of people.
I was pleasantly surprised therefore, by the Darebin libraries website that I discovered this week. Not only is the site nicely designed with a simple, clean interface, but it’s nicely coded too, with semantic (x)HTML, clean CSS and carefully implemented javaScript that helps maintain good accessibility through the use of graceful degradation techniques, otherwise known as progressive enhancement.
Good work Darebin libraries.
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