PortWatch

20 principal portuguese municipal websites have been deconstructed, analized and compared with the current webstandards, in a friendly attempt of advising those municipalities about the current state of the web and the points of view of a lot of webdesigners. Aveiro, Azores, Beja, Braga, Bragan̤a, Castelo Branco, Coimbra, Evora, Faro, Funchal, Guarda, Leiria, Lisbon, Portalegre, Porto, Santarem, Setubal, Viana do Castelo, Vila Real, Viseu Рare those, which sites have been included in this part of the Portwatch.

I was trying to create some kind of a definition what a modern municipality site in the year 2006 should have – and i came with the idea of the declaring this small list of the standards, which i consider to be important or “nice to have”: good support for different browsers, no frames, table-less design, good modern doctype, valid (x)HTML, valid CSS, minimum resolution 800×600, favourite icon, different foreign languages, and WCAG

To be short i will show a few statistics from the final result:

• Frames in portugal are still popular – 6 sites are using them (30%)
• No good design practic (fluid, table-less designs) were found between those 20 municipals, and its a big shame.
• Only8 websites are using doctypes – thats about 40% of the whole pie
• No valid html – at all, 0 sites, 0%, nada.
• Only 5 sites (25%) have a valid css, thats a start … in a year 2006
• 6 sites (30%) are optimized for the 1024×768 resolution and i think it is to much, counting the number of computers in portugal with the resolution 800×600, though it is not that bad i would say.
• Only 3 sites (thats a 15%) have the idea, about using the icons on the net
• Only 3 sites have support for different languages, it seems that the most municipal minds are not interested in having more tourism

If you are interested in what came out, then check it out and take a look at the the results