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University Web Usability Critique

Discussion in 'Websites' started by AcademicTechnologies, Jun 24, 2015.

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  1. #1
    Hello all,
    Our team has been tasked with updating and managing a self-help tech support area for students and faculty on our university’s site.

    I have some general ideas to improve (e.g., would like to find a way to avoid using drop-downs for main content), however I’d love to hear what your thoughts might be.

    We are looking at the Digital Toolkit section of the site and it’s sub-pages. Link here:

    http://www.pace.edu/its/teaching-and-learning/digital-toolkit

    A few points:
    – We don’t have much control over the CSS or page templates in our CMS however we are free to reorganize the hierarchy of pages and do what we want within the main body of each page.
    – From looking at a few months worth of data in Google Analytics, most users are browsing from a desktop or laptop. This makes sense as most of the content is to support desktop applications and tools.

    Thank you!
    Academic Technologies
    Pace University
     
    AcademicTechnologies, Jun 24, 2015 IP
  2. zinist

    zinist Banned

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    #2
    Hi,
    I just reviewed your domain and it is looking good, the only thing i like to change is
    (1)header on your website header you can give some nice moving images
    (2)Change the font size of header make it little bit bigger
    however..really great thinking..
     
    zinist, Jun 29, 2015 IP
  3. AcademicTechnologies

    AcademicTechnologies Peon

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    #3
    Thanks Zinist,
    Yes I can imagine there might be a scrolling carousel or something animated up there at some point in the future.
    -Thanks for your input on this.
     
    AcademicTechnologies, Jul 1, 2015 IP
  4. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #4
    Word of warning, I'm about to give you the Gordon Ramsey / Simon Cowell treatment. I tell you how I see it in NO uncertain terms, so if you're going to react poorly to actual helpful advice and just came here for a pat on the back, READ NO FURTHER!

    Then why the foxtrot hotel are you even USING IT?!? Using the limitations of some crappy CMS is a lame excuse for not fixing things!

    You have to ask, is that because that's the audience, or because your site sucks on those devices so you are having nothing but bounce -- don't use analytics as a lame excuse not to have a properly built website.

    Actually looking at the site, it's a bloated slow inaccessible train wreck of how NOT to build a page. Serif fonts on screen media, illegible fixed metric (px) font sizes, colour contrasts below accessibility minimums, and a pathetically broken attempt at being responsive -- the modern day trifecta of /FAIL/ at web design from an accessibility standpoint. There's WAY too much whitespace making it hard to find anything on any display of less than 1920x1080 and in general things just feel thrown in there with no real plan. My first reaction to it visually was "too many cooks spoiling the stew."

    The utter and complete gibberish use of numbered headings provides no real document structure or non-mouse navigational aids, and at a ridiculously absurd 2.4 megabytes in 71 separate files given that there's only 5.4k of plaintext and maybe a dozen content images just shows that the entire disaster was slapped together any-old-way with off the shelf parts by someone not qualified to be building websites in the first blasted place... So I'm figuring career educator?

    ... and that's before I pop the bonnet to have a look at what's REALLY going on there. The markup too is your typical disaster of "I can haz intarnets" development being 110k of developer ineptitude doing 15k's job. Endless pointless DIV for NOTHING, endless pointless classes for NOTHING, static scripttardery in the markup, static style in the markup, little if anything remotely resembling "semantics" (a sick euphemism for "using HTML properly"), It's a laundry list of how NOT to build a website.

    You'd almost think it was sleazed together with Drupal and jQuery... Oh look!!!

    Seriously, if whoever made that site doesn't know what's wrong with this:
    <body class="html not-front not-logged-in no-sidebars page-node page-node- page-node-58609 node-type-t3-article og-context og-context-node og-context-node-57887 section-its" >
  <div class="skip-link">
    <a href="#main-content" class="element-invisible element-focusable">Skip to main content</a>
  </div>
  
  <div id="page-wrap">

        <header id="hdr-page" class="hide-for-large-up">
      <div id="header-logo"><a href='/'><img src="/sites/all/themes/pace7r/images/logo-sm.png" alt="Pace University" class="logo-pace"></a></div>
      <div id="button-nav-main">main navigation</div>
      <div id="button-nav-mypace">my pace</div>
    </header>

    <div id="main" class="main">
            
<header class="row-full-width">
    <div class="large-12 columns">
        
  <div class="panel-pane pane-panels-mini pane-site-header"  >
    
            
    
    
<div class="row-full-width clearfix show-for-medium-up">
    <div class="large-12">
    Code (markup):
    They need to back the blazes away from the keyboard and go take up flipping burgers for a living. Like a great many disasters of epic proportions people have deluded themselves into thinking is a website, my advice would be to take that ENTIRE mess, throw it in the trash and start over from scratch using people who actually have something resembling a clue what the **** they are doing.

    Sorry if that seems harsh, but the truth often is. There is NOTHING present on any of the pages of that site apart from the handful of bits of actual text content (which are far and few between) that I'd even try to salvage from that. Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure! It is a usability and accessibility wreck thanks to a mixture of ignorance, ineptitude, and poor development choices.... and it would be far easier to redo everything from scratch than to try and patch up that mess with bailing wire and chewing gum.

    Sadly what you have there is ENTIRELY inline with what I have come to expect the moment educators are involved in anything...
     
    deathshadow, Jul 2, 2015 IP