Web page investigated: http://www.ssc.ca
Date accessed: May 8, 2000
Objective of the page:
This page was developed by the Statistical Society of Canada with a number of objectives in mind: to encourage the development and use of statistics and probability, to increase public awareness of the importance of statistics, to develop statistical methodology, and to get Canadian statisticians together and sharing ideas.
Effectiveness of the page:
I thought this page was very effective at achieving its main objectives. There were clear links to pages on meetings, publications, sections and regions, committees, a discussion list, other resources, an email search and a general search mechanism. This allows one to search for journal articles in the publication of the society (Canadian Journal of Statistics), to find out what's going on in the different sections and regions of the society and what the different committees are doing. The discussion list seemed to have a number of active participants discussing numerous topics (the problems with Excel is a hot topic of the moment).
All links on the page were current and the page is obviously updated regularly (e.g. there was information on an upcoming job fair taking place in June, 2000). The page presented all information in both English and French, and this was done very well and did not inhibit reading through the page at all.
One problem that I did find with the site is that the job ads site takes you nowhere, but tells you to look at the discussion list for job listings. This means that to look for jobs you have to search through all the discussion postings. This was also an undesirable feature of the page as the job ads link is essentially useless.
As discussed in class, the page layout and links available in this site was very similar to the page of the American Statistical Association ( http://amstat.org). This facilitates movement around the page of one society if you are more familiar with the page of another society.