Call Sign December 2000

COMPUTER CHINCHAT

It's been a while since I visited any UK taxi web sites, so I thought I'd check out two sites that have been released recently, both coincidentally belonging to the LTDA.
   First there's http://www.taxinews.co.uk which is a latecomer to the world of taxi related news on the Internet. Many others, including my own taxicab.co.uk web site (where you can also link to Dial-a-Cab and Call Sign) have been there for a long time, but Taxinews will also also provide world-wide news.
   Taxinews.co.uk has five main sections to its site, News, Debate, LTDA, Who we are and Advertise. The design of the site is pretty much what you'd expect on a taxi web site, the initial home page being black and orange whilst the rest of the site changes colours for each section. When there are only five main sections, navigation is very easy and you can traverse the whole site in a couple of minutes. Still it's early days yet and hopefully the site design will improve with time. So far as news goes, it is quite informative and interesting, with a substantial amount that isn't connected to the taxi trade.
   Now to the second one, the LTDA web site at http://www.ltda.co.uk/. This is completely different, probably because they appear to have employed some web designers. But there are some irritating inconveniences. The whole of the LTDA site has been constructed using Macromedia flash, but what about those people like myself who don't want to download processor intensive flash animations?
   If you're using Microsoft Windows NT and want to see what amount of processor time a flash animation uses, start up Task Manager and view the CPU usage, and all that's doing is showing animations!
   Anyway, once you've waited for the flash animation to download, you're presented with - yep guess what - orange and black screens! However, I can't be negative; the site is well designed and well developed with some nice touches. It contains all the information you'd expect concerning the LTDA and is a pleasure to navigate, especially the little animated taxis that, when clicked, rear up and beep!

It's Christmas!
Ahhh, Christmas is looming! Time to check out some Christmas sites to see if things have improved since last year!
The first port of call was http://www.xmas.co.uk/. First impressions were that it appeared to be a nicely designed, graphical site. I even went through the process of buying some toys for my kids. Xmas.co.uk provides prominent links to W.H.Smith and Freemans, with Freemans being the toys online store. However, I wasn't too enamoured with the Xmas.co.uk and Freemans.com combination. Firstly because I selected the toys and went to the

purchase the items, only to be asked for my credit card details when NOT in a secure transmission environment; I was absolutely appalled. Their problem is that xmas.co.uk includes freemans.com within the framed structure of the xmas.co.uk web site, thereby some hyperlinks did not take you to the secure web site which should've been the https:// protocol and I also should've seen the padlock in my status bar.
   I eventually found the correct button to click and provided my credit card details, but I ended up sending them this email:
   "I've managed to proceed to order on a secure connection only to supply my credit card details and receiving a reply that none of the items are in stock. Surely I should've been informed of this prior to supplying my credit card details. Has my credit card details now been spoofed and is someone now using it illegally? Sorry, but your site is not very intuitive and left me thinking that I've just been duped into supplying my credit card details."
   Well, I think you've probably realised that I won't be returning there again...!

The Greatest Christmas Web Site Ever?
One site I most definitely will be returning to is http://www.santa-claus.com. What a site, what a really great site! It is split into two main sections: 'Fun Stuff' and 'The Shop'. The latter is located at: http://shop.santa-claus.com/ and what a cool online store it is too! I love the elevator animation when you pass your cursor over one of the virtual floors, a really novel idea. As you'd expect, there are sections such as, Santa's ideas, Gift Search, Make a wish list and About Santa's Shop. The 'wish' list is going to be a real pain for us parents; you can expect all those net-savvy kids to start making electronic wish lists rather than just circling toys from the catalogue!
The 'Fun Stuff' section is also great with an exhaustive list of possible sections, Send an Electronic Christmas Card, Competitions, Xmas Music, Cool Stuff that includes Jokes, Crosswords, Puzzles and Screensavers, etc. And if all that isn't enough, for every transaction carried out, Father Christmas Ltd (santa-claus.com's owners) will donate 50p to ChildLine, http://www.childline.org.uk/
In fact this site is definitely worth five stars, one because it's British, two because it's lively and well designed, three because it's really secure, four because 50p gets donated to ChildLine for every transaction and five because the graphics are brilliant. Five stars *****

And finally, a very Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year to you all. See you in 2001...

Vince Chin