I've looked at the BBC webwise site before and consider it an excellent resource. The link is to one particular section which I spent a few minutes looking at. Wearing my critical hat here were a few things I thought were good and less good features:
Good features:
Doesn't overload you with information, written simply and intuitive to navigate. Looks quite good (but see below). Everything seemed to load pretty quickly (but see below). Text version adds to accessibility (but see below!) Lots of interactivity: quizzes and web quests (for example the "mission" to see if a particular virus is real or not). The Jargonbuster glossary is really good.
Not so good features:
I looked at one of the modules on viruses. while I quite liked the colourful and clear interface I very soon became irritated by the spider motif, especially when it drops down on its piece of web. So I clicked on the Text Only link and it was one long piece of text. I thought this was a bit shoddy, it wouldn't have hurt to have divided it up into a few smaller sections. An intermediate "kill the spider" link might be nice!
I then tried out a section which indicated it was for beginners: how to use your keyboard, mouse, etc. There was a "More Info" link which I didn't see until later on, this told me that it was a Flash resource. I think it would have been much better to have had a prominent link saying this before the resource actually loaded. Not everyone has Flash plug in and it is not very accessible (at all if using a web reader). It took quite a while to load and when it did the images looked a bit out of focus to me. Similarly some of the buttons on the main website used quite small text. I feel they should have had text only links there too.
Comments:
It's a great website in many ways but I'd have to criticise the sheer volume of stuff. It's great that the site is so comprehensive but also rather intimidating. The animated/Flash stuff is irritating but the text only version is not chunked very well so is a real turn off. It'd be nice to have an intermediate version that still looks okay but which dispenses with the spider and the animations.
Overall evaluation:
Very useful public service website