Golf.uk.net Critique

Golf.uk.net is designed by Tom Gilder. This is a really well designed site and I chose it uses images for its navigation rather than marked up text. Its a very good example of an attractive Accessible site because of the the way it looks and the way it's constructed.

Purpose

The Golf.uk.net site aims to promote golf and golf services. Possibly, it has a secondary purpose as a commercial venture to gain advertising revenue. The site provides the following services:

• Golf holidays from around the world
• Golf news from UK & Ireland and around the globe
• Chat room and forums
• Search UK golf accommodation providers
• Monthly competitions
• Searchable database of golf clubs in the UK and Ireland

Presentation

A fully featured site with a strong design theme. The site supports extended functionality with a PHP driven bulletin board, Externally hosted chat facilities and a fantastic golf course and accommodation finder. Possibly, there would be some issues with the placement of images that are used in the side menu if another CSS style sheet was selected. This was not tested.

Site Accessibility

Checking the site with the Bobby Validation tool, all tested pages of the web site correspond to the defaults of the WCAG 1.1 in the priorities 1 & 2.

All tested pages validate 1.1 after XHTML strict.

All tested pages have meaningful structured and semantic constructed markup.

Heading elements from h1 to h4 are present.

Overall this site makes good use of Accessibility indexes, CSS and well structured code to provide an Accessible web site.

No testing or validation was carried out on the the bulletin board or chat facility as this is beyond the scope of this project.

This site offers the most features of a traditional community web site and has a high degree of Accessibility built in to the design. However, It is also the "weakest" with its potential to cause problems with display on some appliances due to its image based navigation and third party communication tools.