Having fun with maps

The subject of my “Mémoire”, the 60-page “Master Thesis” I have to write for university, is linked to European law, and I therefore use the europa.eu portal a lot (read: the EU institution websites and EUR-Lex were by far the websites I visited the most these past weeks).

The problem is, they all use text to get users to select their language. If it were a bilingual website, it would be easy. But there are 23 official languages in the EU, and so it takes time to figure out which string of text is “yours”.
The worst front page, in my opinion, is the Council’s homepage, which I find impossible to use under five seconds.

I therefore decided to try (during a small break) my hand at another system: maps.

I may be crazy, but I’ve taken a liking to webdesign and coding, and I’m starting to brush up my Photoshop skills in the hopes of coming up with fresh designs (for my personal website, as I don’t go around offering my services to others).

So… I started playing around with a bunch of maps pulled from the web, and put my CSS and HTML knowledge to the test.
The result is the following:
www.arpia.be/europa/
www.arpia.be/europa/europa2.html

Opinions?

I like it a whole lot more than the version they have over at the Consilium website, so I contacted the webmaster to suggest taking a look. Who knows, someone over there might read the e-mail and like the result!

Edit:
Well, I got an answer:

Nevertheless, having in mind the linguistic divesity within the European Union, I have a strong preference for a list of languages.

Too bad!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, 15 April 2009 at 13:33 and is filed under Computing, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 comments

  1. Ali says:
    17 April 2009 at 10:55

    Yours is a lot more intuitive. Even if you live in Malta it’s a lot quicker to find.

  2. Peter Craddock says:
    17 April 2009 at 10:58

    Heh, thanks Ali. I did get a second response from them: “Thank you for yopu suggestions. We will discuss them with my team”. We’ll see what comes of it.

    Still, I’m sure there’s room for much improvement (such as support for IE6… right now, it’s not centred, and on my WINE version of IE6, I couldn’t get the hover effects to work).
    Any ideas?

  3. Ali says:
    17 April 2009 at 11:16

    Oh, don’t get me started on centring in IE6 – not an ideal solution, but I think what you’d have to do is something like this:

    body {text-align:center;}
    map {position:relative; text-align:left}

    I’m not sure about the hover. Have you tried using display:none and display:inline to hide and show the text?

    At least the IE8 update will target IE6 users.

  4. Peter Craddock says:
    17 April 2009 at 14:13

    Bother, still won’t work. In fact, making the #map “position:relative” kind of destroyed the layout on IE, because the map was nowhere to be seen :D
    Since I’d have to think clearly for that (I’m still very much in my “working on thesis” mood), I reckon I’ll only be touching this again if the Council web team tells me they’re interested in the idea.

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