Evaluation of the Travel.com.au

Travel.com.au is a online travel agency website design for  people to arrange their own leisure travel. It is very easy to find by the search engine (like google), the site name is very easy to remember and reach by Australian.

I will concentrate to evaluate this website on its Navigation, Color Schemes and Web accessibility.

Navigation :-

A good website navigation must be well constructed, easy to use and intuitive (mardiros.net, 2011).

The homepage for the travel.com.au is as follow:-

Travel.com.au use top navigation bar as the primary navigation for the whole site. The top navigation bar consists of task page tabs (with self explanation text), this design give a very clear pathway for the user to have a quick access for the important tasks. Moreover, the user can access any page from different page by pressing all those tabs.

There is one important thing that I don't really like is that there is a little confusion on the flight, holiday and hotel part, the user can select the corresponding task from the Home, Flight, Holiday and Hotel tabs. It looks very convenient at the first run, but after a further investigation; I found that by selecting different tabs for the same task (e.g. Flight on Home and Flights tab), the display page will have different contents as shown on the following diagram.

So the user may have chance to miss some important information by selecting the same task in different ways. Moreover, there is no site map for the web site, therefore it all depends on the experience (guess) of the user for operation.

My suggestion will be if possible, the web site should include a site map and a more consistence content on its task from different links.



Color Schemes :-

Color Schemes are the important component for Web design.

This website use the "BLUE" as its primary color, it can donates confidence, security and reliability feeling for its user (buzzle.com, 2010). In addition, it use orange color (harmonious with blue) to highlight the selection button and important notice.

In most of the case, when you select a tab, button, link, etc, the color of the selected area will change or underlined therefore it give a very clear indication for the user on their choice. Moreover, the font's color is in white therefore it has a very strong contrast for the user to read for the content.

The only thing needs to improve in the site may be the consistence of the colors, in some cases the selection button is using blue (when the background is not blue) rather than orange.

Of course, it can still highlight the different between the background and the button but from my point of view, it is non-harmonious. A consistent color schemes within a site will make user feel more comfortable and more easy to navigate.



Web accessibility :-

A good designed website should give equal access to information and functionality for all users (abilities and disabilities).
I have use a text-to-speech software to test this website and the result is very encouraging. Most of the tabs, buttons and links highlighted can converted into the correct speech. It helps the poor sight or blind people to access the information. But for all those graphic-related advertisement, this site is not doing a great job on them. In addition, if you have a poor sight but don't have the text-to-speech software on hand, it is really difficult to access the information as the fonts are too small because of too much information on the same home page.

The site can improve the accessibility by using sub-title bar so that less information is on the same page, therefore the font can be bigger. Moreover, when a site is coded with semantically meaningful HTML, with textual equivalents provided for images and with links named meaningfully, the text-to-speech software can help for all those user with poor sight or blind (wikipedia, 2011).

Moreover, if this site can following  the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, then it can making the web content more accessible.