- Description ... www.maldivianairtaxi.com
Maldivian Air Taxi is a sea plane operator in Maldives. Maldivian Air Taxi website is a site which gives much information about the services provided by the business to its various kinds of customers. From the website it conveys many information about the history of the company, mission / vision of the company, information to foreigners about Maldives, information about the air crafts' they use, job opportunities available from the company, destinations they operate to, important contact personnel, etc...
Image 1: Home page of Maldivian Air Taxi website; http://www.maldivianairtaxi.com/- Target Audience ...
Maldivian Air Taxi website targets everyone from young age to old who are interested in having a journey from arriving to the Hulhule International Airport (the international air port of Maldives which is 10 minutes by a speed boat from Male' the capital city) to any resort the tourist is suppose to stay at. Not only to foreign tourists or foreigners the company aim their business but to locals as well, who want to travel from Capital island Male' to any resorts the company operates to or if anyone who wants to charter a flight to any other island where the company is given license to land their sea planes.
- Aims and Objectives of this website...
Maldivian Air Taxi website is used to attract more customers to use their services while they are staying in Maldives for their holidays, by illustrating the wide range of services they offer to their customers with the modern sea planes they use with the friendly staffs of them. The mission / vision of the company are given in the website as "to provide a reliable, timely and comfortable flying experience for our customers" (www.maldivianairtaxi.com, 2008) this clearly states the real aim and objective of the company website too.
The text is displayed in a very dull color using a grayish color in a white background and as well as in the black menu bar links, which could be very difficult to be read my people having eye sight problems. When the page loads originally the text couldn't be read by me as well, I had to use magnification that is by zooming in the website. After Zooming In the texts are visible and very clear to read. A sample is shown in Image 2 bellow.
- Website advantages ...
- color scheme: simple and eye catching.
- accessibility: navigation bars, hyperlinks.
- graphics: images and animations.
- designed for variable screen dimensions.
- can magnify the site to view without changing any aspect ratio of the images or the site layout.
- Website disadvantages ...
- font: not so visible on first load of the site unless site in magnified and color used is dull.
- search engine function: no search function is included.
- too slow to load the page as it is fully designed by using Flash.
- needs Adobe Flash plug-in to view the website.
- images don't have any description or explanations of which place it is showing or what it is showing.
- Critical Analysis ...
- Text design and Color scheme...
The text is displayed in a very dull color using a grayish color in a white background and as well as in the black menu bar links, which could be very difficult to be read my people having eye sight problems. When the page loads originally the text couldn't be read by me as well, I had to use magnification that is by zooming in the website. After Zooming In the texts are visible and very clear to read. A sample is shown in Image 2 bellow.
Image 2: Text from the Resorts / Tour operators' page of Maldivian Air Taxi website; http://www.maldivianairtaxi.com/
Finally it can be seen that Maldivian Air Taxi site had kept the company's color theme throughout the entire site, that is, Red, Black and White so that the information appears to belong to the website. (Felke-Morris, pp 193,194).
- Provide Accessibility ...
It is very important that website designers consider the many contexts in which their users could be operating, so that accessibility is efficient for all users, including those with disabilities. "FOR WEB SITE TO BE FUNCTIONAL. their content must be accessible and their functions operable-these are basic requirements." (Horton S., 2006). “The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect” (Tim Bernes-Lee cited in Felke-Morris, pp 197)
Maldivian Air Taxi website is no keyboard friendly. The website is made in such a way it works only with a pointing device like a mouse, no keyboard navigation is possible in this website. Therefore, for a user who is not using a mouse, browsing through this website would not be possible which goes against designing websites with universal accessibility for the users.
Users may also have:
Maldivian Air Taxi website works in almost 3 web browsers that I had tested it on. That is IE 7 and 8, Firefox 3.6 and Google Chrome. But there arises a situation where the site could not load. That is if the user does not have Adobe Flash plug-in installed; the entire site could not be viewed. This could make annoying to users as they had to install plug-ins to their computer systems which they might not want to do and may ignore in viewing a site fully made up of flash.
For users with a slow internet connection the initial page loading could be very slow because the entire site is made from Flash. This could make the viewer get annoyed to view the site as well. Designing a website that is able to meet all necessary criteria or needs does not “discourage content developers from using images, video, etc., but rather explains how to make multimedia content more accessible to a wide audience” (W3C 1999).
Image 3: Page not visible because Adobe Flash Plug-in was not installed and the page requests the plug-in to be installed; http://www.maldivianairtaxi.com/
Image 4: Page uses a centered layout; http://www.maldivianairtaxi.com/
Maldivian Air Taxi website is no keyboard friendly. The website is made in such a way it works only with a pointing device like a mouse, no keyboard navigation is possible in this website. Therefore, for a user who is not using a mouse, browsing through this website would not be possible which goes against designing websites with universal accessibility for the users.
Users may also have:
- different operating systems
- earlier version of browser or different kind of browsers installed
- slow internet connection
- different display resolution
Maldivian Air Taxi website works in almost 3 web browsers that I had tested it on. That is IE 7 and 8, Firefox 3.6 and Google Chrome. But there arises a situation where the site could not load. That is if the user does not have Adobe Flash plug-in installed; the entire site could not be viewed. This could make annoying to users as they had to install plug-ins to their computer systems which they might not want to do and may ignore in viewing a site fully made up of flash.
For users with a slow internet connection the initial page loading could be very slow because the entire site is made from Flash. This could make the viewer get annoyed to view the site as well. Designing a website that is able to meet all necessary criteria or needs does not “discourage content developers from using images, video, etc., but rather explains how to make multimedia content more accessible to a wide audience” (W3C 1999).
Image 3: Page not visible because Adobe Flash Plug-in was not installed and the page requests the plug-in to be installed; http://www.maldivianairtaxi.com/- Page Layout Design ...
Maldivian Air Taxi website uses a centered page layout known as the Jello Page Layout. In this layout the contents are centered to fit the middle of the browser leaving equal amount of space from both left and right margin of the browser. Although it seems that they had used a jello page layout the page keeps same dimensions in viewing same as Fixed Width Layout, if viewed in any display resolution.
Image 4: Page uses a centered layout; http://www.maldivianairtaxi.com/- Graphic design and Images ...
Maldivian Air Taxi has ensured not to use many images or animations, while had limited the amount of superfluous images within the site, so that the speed of loading will not be jeopardized.
Air Taxi website uses very few images to convey messages and attract their customers. The images used in the website doesn't give any explanation about what the image is about, what place it is showing. They used anti aliased text in images rather than aliased text. Anti aliased text provides clean. smooth lines without jagged edges. The Logo of Maldivian Air Taxi and the Name of the company on top of the web page (shown separately at the right and left of this text) illust
rates the smooth edging that anti aliasing presents.
rates the smooth edging that anti aliasing presents.- How to improve the site and make it more universal accessible ...
- avoid building the site entirely by using flash, which may not be more accessible to many users, but may use flash animations within the site.
- even though using flash animations or images within the site use alternate text to describe the images or the animations in an event if the user's browser does not load the images or could not play the animations
- use keyboard navigation feature as well, rather than having the entire site dependent upon mouse input no keyboard accessibility is functioning.
- keeping the font colors more visible rather than keeping in a dull color like gray color.
- the page layout used seems to work fine with any display screen size.
- utilize smaller paragraphs and simple language within the site.
- images used in the site needs to be included with some explanations about the images, so that the viewers will know some information about it. Just only showing an image won't help because viewers may need to know more about those places, so then they will be much encouraged to visit the destinations the flight centre is operating to.
- Felke-Morris, T 2009, 'Web Development & Design Foundations with XHTML', Fourth Edition, Pearson Education Inc, Boston.
- Horton, S. 2006, 'Access by design. A guide to universal usability for web designers. Berkeley, CA: Pearson Education.
- Maldivian Air Taxi , 2008, Maldivian Air Taxi, last updated 2008, Retrieved: 15th March 2010, From: http://www.maldivianairtaxi.com
- W3C 1999, 'Web content accessibility guidelines 1.0', last updated 5th May 1999, W3C, Retrieved: 05th March 2010, From: http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505/
