The College maintain an “OnCampus” page, intended to serve as a clearinghouse for electronic resources on campus. I have it set as the home page for all my campus computers, because it lets me access a lot of stuff very quickly– Blackboard, course rosters, academic calendars, etc.
This page has always consisted of two bands of pictures on the left and right edges, with the center of the page being a two-column list of links in a very large font. The links were grouped into ares primarily of interest to students, primarily of interest to faculty, and a third category whose name escapes me.
You see, they have just unveiled a redesigned version of the page, and as always when professional web design people are involved, they have made it significantly less useful.
The old page was simple, clean, and dominated by the list of links to useful resources. More than half of the new page is taken up by a rotating display of photos and a changing list of “news” links. The useful links are now confind to the rightmost third of the page, and the font has accordingly shrunk to the point where I have to either lean in or squint to find what I want. Worse yet, the “Student” and “Faculty/Staff” categories are now contained on different tabs, so I have to click at least twice to access any faculty resources (“Student” is the default). Even better, the tabs are done with Javascript, so I can’t bookmark the faculty stuff.
And so, we have gone from a clean, simple, static, HTML page dominated by useful links, to a Javascript monster dominated by a distracting slide show of publicity photos. I suppose it could be worse– at least it’s not Flash.
We got an email telling us that the changes are part of a larger shift to a “Content Management System” for all the campus web content. As the person responsible for the Physics and Astronomy web pages, I just can’t wait to see what horrors that’s going to bring…
I’m guessing that the changes were made without consulting with people that actually use the system? Because that’s the way bureaucracies seem to work. The tail wags the dog.
There is nothing evil about content management systems that provide dynamic content. They are, quite useful. I think given time, you’ll come to like the new site.
Talk to Aaron. He’s (or was) involved in the previous web re-design…
It could be worse. Can you say “portal”?
What I don’t get is why the photos don’t change when you go to the faculty version. And shouldn’t some of your “lab porn” be added to the photo loop? Sure beats that teacher’s messy blackboard.
What I don’t get is why the opening splash page for the college remains so cluttered. It should be clean, given all of the clutter on the pages for each audience.
Build your own landing page somewhere – anywhere online. Use ‘view source’ on the Union page to get the links. Make this your new home page. Sit back and watch the links rot as they improve the site.
This seems like there are differing beliefs as to what the purpose of the ONCampus page is. Those behind the redesign see it as a portal page that should be visually interesting, while you, a regular user, would prefer a utilitarian, minimalist site.
My suggestion is to ask for them to post a more minimal site at an alternate address. You can pitch it as being compatible with browsers not running javascript, or for mobile devices.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that all web design is bad, it’s just that people tend to notice bad design more often.
I’m actually glad to hear that your university is implementing a CMS system. That should make it much easier for people who aren’t necessarily web-savvy to update site content.
I’m actually glad to hear that your university is implementing a CMS system. That should make it much easier for people who aren’t necessarily web-savvy to update site content.
What I dread about the CMS is that it won’t just make it easier for the non-web-savvy to upload files, but it will very likely make it more difficult for those of us who do know what we’re doing, probably by eliminating the ability to FTP files into known locations.
I’m very happy with the current design of the department web page, and it’s pretty easy to maintain. I fear, though, that the new system will make it impossible to keep the same clean look and feel. Or else it will require me to spend hours figuring out how to strip things down to something that is useful and accessible to the broadest possible audience.
Even better, the tabs are done with Javascript, so I can’t bookmark the faculty stuff.
That’s truly dastardly. I’m sorry. 🙁
at least it’s not Flash
But there IS flash.
I feel for you. As a campus web designer, I fight a constant (hopefully good-natured) battle with younger designers who have better eyesight and who don’t realize that most people don’t have top-quality 24-inch screens and may not have the very latest version of flash.
CRM does not cause bad design, by the way. Bad designers cause bad design.
Ugh. One of my pet peeves about Web sites is when they do things that needlessly assume your browser window is a certain width. On the page you linked to, I could only see the first column of links; I had to scroll to the right to see the second column. A design which requires scrolling to the right is always bad.
Here’s an even worse case I encountered recently. My institute’s intraweb page was recently redesigned, and the administration sent around a note explaining that we should log in to the portal. Where is the link to log in, I asked. Use the box in the upper right hand corner, they said. What box in the upper right hand corner, I replied. It turned out that in the initial design said box only appeared if your browser window was at least a certain width, which was larger than the window width I prefer. I insisted that they fix that problem. I like a narrow browser window so that I actually have some screen real estate for real work.
In my somewhat limited experience, most CMS systems allow for uploading to some directory architecture determined by the software, but you are still free to upload via FTP and link as before. The key is that you can separate the design elements from the content. Of course you’re familiar with how convenient this is for content creators, from using the ScienceBlogs backend.
Actually that page has some issues, at least on my screen. The text for the buttons runs off to the right side and is clipped. There are some other, more subjective UI things that I’m sure others might point out, but since these are more matters of personal design choices I won’t mention them.
I appreciate the preference for clean and minimal design – I prefer it as well. As I said above, most of the point of the CMS is so that you, the content producer, won’t have to worry about the design; sort of how in LaTeX you can just write rather than wrangle with the formatting. Implementing a design is done at the site level, and creating a clean and simple layout should be straightforward.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not really defending the designers in this case. I agree with the previous comment that posits that the ONCampus site was redone without consulting the users, and isn’t particularly well suited to actual use. My point is that this doesn’t make professional web design or CMS systems bad, it just means that poorly done design is.
There is flash–the aforementioned rotating pictures. (I assume. I can’t see them since flash isn’t working on my linux system w/ firefox 3 beta 5.)
More importantly, it’s silly to paint all “professional web design” folks with the same broad brush. It’s entirely possible to find _good_ web designers out there. Take a look at http://alistapart.com/ for a pleasant example by some serious professionals.
I particularly liked the microscopic thumbnail images at the bottom, which, when moused-over, helpfully provided automatic expanded views that were all the way up in the mesoscopic range.
Very helpful!
When my wife was a Physics professor and I was an Adjunct Math professor at the same university, we heard about a new committee having been formed to redesign the web pages for both campuses.
We pointed out to the Chairman of said committee, and some others, that I’d started programming in 1966 (42 years ago as I type this), that we’d both worked for a giant ISP (Earthlink) where I was a manager in the Web Services department, and that our own web domain was getting 15,000,000 hits per year. Could at least one of us be on the committee, to offer our expertise?
They actually apologized. Then they said “no.” After all, the university gives degrees in Graphic Design, Animation, and related fields, so they have more than enough know-how.
Right.
Proper design and layout is done by graphic artists, who aren’t generally consulted on web design because the tools claim any monkey can do it. Any monkey indeed can, but most will do it badly, and programmers shouldn’t be allowed near UI design without a gun pointed at them and a proper graphic arts person at their side.
Beware the content management system. At a nearby college campus which shall remain nameless, the new CMS implementation required department webmasters to undergo 40+ hours of training! These are people who hand-coded pages before, and now they have to sit in a class for 40 hours to learn how to type in a box.
Think of it as retro. It looks exactly like those old frames that used to clutter up web pages back in the early 1990s.
Jonathan Vos Post, alas that’s a very believable story. I think ageism is a factor.
Not only software tools that make huge promises (let us stop for three hours to fix a template spewed out of DreamWeaver and extruded through Adobe “Contribute”) but also digital cameras that people think makes them professional photographers. Just because you own a hammer doesn’t mean you know how to build a house.
At minimum, try to get them to watch this expert training video in website design. It may break the ice. Then introduce them to Lynch & Horton’s Web Style Guide from Yale University Press, or Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. Neither is about code, they’re about the logic of page design.
Oh fun, 186 errors when I ran it through an html validator.
In addition to the UI problems.
Proper layout is done by someone who understands that not everyone may be interacting with this visually in the same way (think a blind person).
I rather liked the logical layout of
H1 [Missing Heading]
H2 [Missing Heading]
H3 [Missing Heading]
H4 NEWS
H4 DID YOU KNOW
H4 FEATURED EVENTS
H4 CALENDARS
H5 Campus Links
H5 Academic Links
H5 Minerva Houses
H5 Campus Links
H5 Academic Links
H5 Minerva Houses
H4 FEATURES
Having Campus and Academic Links be subsets of Calendars should be interesting for anyone trying to navigate other than by visual cues.
it doesnt really look stupid to me
Another on the list of things that make me snicker for being so commonly said and so untrue:
“sort of how in LaTeX you can just write rather than wrangle with the formatting.”
Brought to you by the people who inspired the expression “hacking the document”…
Or, more importantly, Google, which interacts with your page in a similar way to how a blind person would. Even if you are 100 percent sure no blind person will ever have need to visit your page, you can be 100 percent (unless you take specific steps to prevent it–if you do, why are you putting it on the web?) sure that Google will visit, and it will not rank you highly if it can’t find anything.