Well, that’s not completely true. Actually, I despise them, with every ounce of hate and loathing I can muster and then some. They’re horrendous: it’s as if they say “You know, this Internet thing might catch on someday, and when it does, we’d like to be at the forefront. But until then, just throw up whatever comes to mind and we’ll sort it out later. Don’t worry about how it looks, whether it’s fully accessible by everyone, or even whether it’s usable; we’ll get to that stuff when this whole Internet thing really starts to pick up.”
It’s just totally unbelievalbe, and it drives me mad everytime I try to peruse through one.
(For those of you paying attention, I’ve gone over this before. Thanks to the MySQL crash, though, you can’t view my previous post on this subject. If you’re still interested, read on…)
Let’s use the local 3C’s site as an extremely-fitting example. Here’s a quick list of things that are simply wrong with this site I can pick out from a quick overview of the site:
- Splash Page: I don’t care what anyone says–more than 99% of the time (and absolutely in this case) splash pages serve no purpose that any other, more feature-and-information-full page could.
- No Structure: Those categories on the right look nice, until you actually start surfing. The site has no definitive structure, the only unifying links being those accross the top. And even those are often in two seperate places on the same page, often with differing names, for no apparent reason.
- Overflow: Once you get past the splash page, nearly every other page has navigation shifted to the left. I use the term navigation loosely here, as more often than not, their are so many links (arbitrarily sorted by alphabetical order) as to make the list nearly useless. Some entries are even duplicated, in the same list, on the same page, for no reason.
- Hidden Navigation: This is, admittedly, more personal preference. Still, hiding navigation links in a drop-down menu has never made sense to me–it might have made sense back when people were using 640×480 resolutions and screen space was at an absolute premium, but this is the 21st century. Most people I know are surfing at at least 1024×768, and even 800×600 is large enough for nearly any design.
To be fair, the local 3C’s site is extremely bad. That’s not saying much, though. Among other things, I’ve seen: a college site that took nearly ten minutes to fully load, a site using pop-up navigation in such a way that it was only Internet Explorer compatible and absolutely required for viewing the site, and a number of other things that just don’t make any sense. I mean, nearlly all other professional websites don’t have these problems, and certainly not at the same level as college websites when they do.
What’s wrong with colleges? It already costs an arm and a leg to go; don’t you think they’d want a killer website to bleed those last few pennies out of everyone that came across it? They practially burry the information your looking for in an endless sea of confusing navigation and useless images, and then, when you finally think you’ve made it somewhere, the information is either: unavailable (your using the wrong web browser, have javascript turned off, etc.) or horribly outdated.
I’m sick of it. I was told who to talk to today about getting a job at the local 3C working on their website, and I’d love to get the chance. I’d make an example out of it: how to make a usable, attractive website accessible to nearly everyone. Something that actually made people want to visit the college website.
Update: Whilst digging through the pages on the local 3C’s site, I came across their Web Publishing Guidelines. I was at first shocked that they had any, and after looking through, I’m still not very impressed. It does, however, answer a few questions.
The left-side bar is, apparently, a list of related links and is not meant as any sort of internal navigation. Imagine how they could have cleared some of my ranting up by just slapping the words “Related Links” at the top of the list? It still doesn’t excuse the slipshod fashion in which the links are arranged, nor the usually overwhelming number of them.
Since the left-side bar is not meant for navigation, that only leaves the drop-down menu, which takes me back to my fourth point: why on earth, for all that is sacred, would anyone think that hiding the primary navigation links in a drop-down menu is a good thing?
Anyways, I now seriously doubt that they would be open to any sort of site redesign. Any changes from the “look and feel” (using the term loosely) of the site has to be approved by marketing. I’d still like to work on it, though. I might be able to do something to help it.
Update: I just found a Website Experience Survey on the site, the link for which is inexplicably located at the bottom of the “related links” list, which I doubt most people ever make it through. I filled it out, expressing some of my complaints (as the form allowed), hopefully in a more–ahem–congenial manner. I doubt it will change anything, but it’s nice to at least get the fealing that I’m complaining to the college and not just myself.