Well folks I just got back from the sunny Algarve in Portugal yesterday afternoon. The touchdown of flight FR7067 from Faro at around 3 yesterday (Sunday 28th) brought an end to a very enjoying couple of days in the family place in Albuferia with some College friends. The trip consisted of some boozy nights out with the local portuguese people and other tourists on the ‘Strip’ but also involved some pretty heavy ’socialising’ with the good auld Irish tourists and ex-pats in the main Irish bars such as Erins Isle and Father Eds. When not sipping on €.27 cent bottles of beer by the pool or downing €2.50 pints in one of the aforementioned bars we were stuffing our bellys with amazing T-Bone steak, which in one place in particular was practically the size of a keyboard. One thing is for sure, the portuguese do a mean steak.
Anyhow while I was walking through Dublin Airport it reminded that their website was to be relaunched recently so after wading through 154 emails since Wednesday for the AKA Marketing.com website (please don’t tell me to get a Blackberry because I won’t listen) I decided to check the Dublin Airport website to see if the new site (located at DublinAirport.com) was live, it was and here’s a couple of paragraphs about it.
The new site was launched a couple of weeks ago, April the 7th to be precise. The web design house who took on the responsibilty of the redesign was Red Sky. Red Sky are well known and have worked with AIB, VHI and Fianna Fail to name just a few of their clients, their focus is on creating websites with strong accessibility and usability without comprising on asthetics.
The new DublinAirport.com site homepage is well constructed and contains information which visitors will most likely want when visiting an airport’s website such as live flight information, local weather information and the latest airport news which at the moment includes items about Ryanair’s new European routes, departure floor improvements and the relocation of Bank Of Ireland’s Bureau de Change desk. This news more than likely runs off a content management system so non-technical people would easily be able to update it, therefore it is very likely to be kept up to date.
The layout & navigation is an integral part of any website design, thus I will continue to talk about it for a couple of lines. The layout of the new site seems to follow generally accepted web standards which everyone is familiar with such as navigation along the top, navigation along the left, main content in the middle and then a right sidebar for advertisments or other bits and bobs. The navigation along the left often breaks into different sub-sections depending on the current page/section being browsed, this is done in such as way as to make it easy to figure out where in the site hierarchy you are. The homepage of the dublinairport.com site is available via a link on every single page, this is a big plus as often visitors will arrive at one of a site’s inner pages via search engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN and will be looking for a handy way to find the homepage. Standard issue stuff really as far a layout and navigation is concerned then.
In terms of accessibility, the new design is quite good (the accessibility statement page mentions that an audit is currently going on so it might improve further when feedback comes in) and avoids many pitfalls which make a site less usable to those with disabilities such as the use of exact pixel or point measurements when specifying font sizes in CSS which means pressing ‘Ctrl’ and the ‘+’ buttons together does not increase the size of the text on the page in Internet Explorer; it still works in Firefox though for some reason. Other ‘features of accessibility’ include access keys for quick access to important pages and structured H1, H2, etc. tags which allow screenreaders to read through a page in correct sequence. Standard accessibility features such as alt and title tags are of course seen throughout the site too. Accessibility is very important to the web in general and dublinairport.com certainly does not cut any corners in this respect.
The web design company, the homepage, the layout & navigation and accessibility of the site have been covered so far. Lets talk then in terms of the actual content of the site. There are (from what I can see) five distinct areas of content on the site targeted towards the actual ‘user’ of the airport. I’ll first list them as links (which all open in a new window) and then go into a little bit more detail on each one, they are ‘Flight Information‘, ‘Plan Your Trip‘, ‘To & From The Airport‘, ‘At The Airport‘ and ’Shops & Restaurants‘.
The flight information section contains live arrival and departure information, flight timetables but also an interactive ‘Destination and Airlines‘ page where you can find out which airlines fly to which destinations, the times for these flights and whether or not they are direct or stop-over flights. The plan your trip section is full of useful information and also includes an ebookers.com interface to make booking a holiday easier. The section contains pages which cover topics such as Airport Security, Check-in, Passports & Visas, Imports & Customs, Foreign Currency & Banking, Car Rentals, Packing, Travelling With Pets and content regarding people with Reduced Mobility.
The to & from the airport section contains information which is helpful for those visiting Dublin for the first time and contains information about travelling to and from the airport via taxi, coach, bus etc. The designers have even put in a ‘By Rail’ page which clarifies the fact that Dublin airport actually has no rail links just in case tourists are wondering if they can travel to the city by rail and I’m sure there will be plenty of those as nearly every major airport has some sort of rail links… expect Dublin airport of course, everyone can thank the ‘Department of Transport‘ for that.
The next section is the at the airport section. This section will allow any interested party to find out more about the facilities and services available at the airport, one of the content rich areas in this section is an excellent interactive maps page featuring all the different areas of the airport. Below the maps various shops, toilets, kiosks, etc. are listed and when one of the items in the list is clicked upon then that shop, toilet or whatever is highlighted on the map, very useful indeed. Other pages and sub-sections in the at the airport section include (among plenty of others of course) lost property, Internet access, baby changing facilities, postal facilities, religious facilities, customer services and aiport security.
The final section which is targeted towards the ‘user’ of the airport then is the shops & restaurants section, as the name suggests it covers all the shops and restaurants in Dublin airport, the information it gives includes the names of the individual shop or restaurant, its location and its opening hours.
As mentioned above these five sections are aimed at the ‘user’ of the airport, but the site also contains a B2B section which focuses on the business aspect of the Dublin Airport Authority such as Doing Business with Us, Airport Developments, Health and Safety, Career Notices, Media Centre and the Environment amongst many others. For those of you that don’t know who the Dublin Airport Authority are they are basically the management company which manages all issues of the airport. They are a state owned company.
After going through an overview of the main sections above let takes an overhead look then at the good points and bad points about the newly designed site. The major attraction of the new site is the overwhelming amount of useful information covering just about everything and anything regarding the airport. The site is only new and thus many pages might not be indexed in Google yet but a ’site:www.dublinairport.com’ query already returns over 200 pages and considering the nature and aims of the site this is pretty darn good. This information is ‘packaged’ in a very user friendly and clean design which should be appealing to everyone (well almost everyone) including those with disabilities and difficulties using the Internet. In my opinion another clap on the back must be given to the design company for their use and reference of external resources (I believe in not reinventing the wheel) which are very useful to tourists and holidaymakers such as ebookers.com for easier booking of hotels/holidays and the AA Ireland route planner to help people find their way around the city and country a lot easier than they otherwise could have.
When I said ‘well almost everyone’ above this was in relation to in my opinion one of the major downfalls of the site, which is the lack of any non-english versions. An airport website for an airport that claims to be ‘international’ which is without support for German, Italian, French etc. speaking people is a big flaw. Even in the actual airport itself many signs are written in many different languages to facilitate non-english speaking people, not everyone is a Paddy or a Yank (no offence intended to my fellow Irish or indeed American people of course). A minor issue with the site is the lack of a sitemap which would enable people to get a quick overview of all the different sections and pages on the site, of course this is just my opinion but considering the emphasis Red Sky’s design team have paid to accessibility and usability I’m sure others will agree with me.
In closing then the Dublin airport site is now very very impressive. It is a site that looks good, is easy to use and is filled with excellent content, this in most people’s view is what makes a great site.
