I can’t say too much about it now, but one thing I’m currently working on is an improved presentation of the Department of Education and Skills’s school performance tables. No, we don’t say league tables, even if others do. The latest tables were published today; we’ll have a new ‘skin’ on them in a few weeks. And you’re going to love it.
It’s been an interesting exercise today, looking at the various treatments of the same tabular information on the various news websites. The Independent comes bottom in my book, with a very nasty cut-and-paste job on some very rudimentary HTML. A surprise winner, given their reticence in embracing the web, is the Daily Mail – who actually ran the tables as their homepage’s lead story for most of the morning, until Ruth Kelly spoke in the Commons. There’s a nice illustrated search box, with free-text searching for school names and towns; the summary tables have a cute row-by-row hover effect; and they have individual pages for individual schools. That tops even the BBC.
Actually, the Daily Mail site is a genuine surprise. Journalists blogging? Readers commenting on stories? All sorts of RSS feeds? I don’t know about you, but I would never have had the Mail down as a Web 2.0 candidate.