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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
You see, they have just unveiled a redesigned version of the page<\/a>, and as always when professional web design people are involved, they have made it significantly less useful.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/strong> to see what horrors that’s going to bring…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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… Continue reading Web Design Is Stupid<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}