Critiques
I would like your overall critique of any of these sites.
My role was in the design/project management.
I’m the head of web management here at the Ministry of Education in Singapore and we’re revamping our webpages. Rather than appoint a vendor like government agencies are used to doing, I got myself hired here and persuaded the management to allow me to lead a small team to build everything from scratch in-house.
The Ministry of Education’s website is one of the most frequented in Singapore and I hope that it will be the start of many more standards-compliant websites to come.
The section on Special Education that has already been completed:
And a possible mockup of the homepage
Clark University has just undergone, in the last year, a complete overhaul of our public facing website (CSS styled lists using the hover pseudo-class. An example of that is the third level menu seen below. We use a combination of a CSS styled list and Cold Fusion to control the active states. Each subsite in our web has one of these so its important that it not require image creation, etc to change a menu.
Since then, we’ve become more committed to trying to move to a fully standards compliant site and the first step can be seen here:
These pages are still being developed so not all of the links work. But some of the best examples of the subpages are:
These subpages represent our second level pages and our goal is to roll these out along with the homepage and then take on each academic department and office individually. With our small staff, that’s the only option.
These pages validate perfectly except for the rel attribute used in the main navigation menu. This is a javascript solution I found online after many many hours of trying to get the functionality of this rollover menu exactly as our Communications department wanted it. Its clunky and has way more javascript than I’d like but I was simply pulling my hair out with a huge variety of methods I found on the various CSS sites. Better ideas?
One of my jobs this year will be to redesign this site and our main site completely. Our organization puts out a lot of articles and reports, runs a popular political blog, and hosts a lot of events at the center. A big challenge in a 2007 redesign will be to find ways to show a lot of this content and information clearly, with easy navigation, and without overwhelming readers with too much text… That said, I’m curious to hear what the experts thing we’re doing well right now, where we need to rethink our approach, and how we might re-organize our site in a more useful way…
I have three URLs that I’m hoping the presenters will review. I’m most concerned with usability and accessibility. The state legislature of Oklahoma enacted accessibility mandates for all state agencies, including universities and other state-funded schools, that are very similar (though a touch more strict) to the federal section 508 standards. Complete information about the Oklahoma standards is available at http://www.ok.gov/accessibility/TADwebmay2005.html
Our institution is the first within the state to come close to compliance—something in which I have significant pride—but I’m always looking for ways to improve our simple, html strict templates. The URLs for the sites are below. Thank you, in advance, for your consideration and feedback.
This is the front page of OU Law. Its CSS is independent of the rest of the site. The various sections are fixed-width, but use css/js for fluid heights, as all three of the major sections—main menu, Events & Information, and Spotlight/Sidebar—change regularly.
This page showcases our standard template and details the incorporated accessibility features. Again, accessibility, usability, and logical flow are the primary concerns.
This site is still in development, and I’d very much enjoy some feedback on the form structures (found in the ‘For Attorneys’ section) and accessibility.
I would love for you to take a look at the below site and go through the main flow which is from the homepage to the form page then to the results and from there going to either the loan details page or cross loan compare, with a focus on the from and result pages.
REMOVED
http://www.vertexinc.com/
http://rotchscholarship.org/competition/
http://www.labsarevital.com/
Vermont Coalition to End Homelessness
Vermont Resident Service Coordinators
www.paratidesigns.com
Problem with “coolness” (my site feels old fashioned to me, even though its design is less than a year old) and browser (in)compatibility.
This is a weekly news source for university faculty and staff:
http://www.unh.edu/news/campusjournal/
It is a very recent redesign from this:
http://unh.edu/news/campusjournal/2006/121306cj.html
One of the needs being met in the redesign is that the home page of the
site needs to also play nicely with email clients, as it gets emailed to
1500 people each week. Up until this redesign the email version was just
a list of plain text links. The new version is both plain text and html.
However, we don’t have the resources to produce multiple versions of the
home page, so the code used is somewhat of a hybrid. We actually use
some cold fusion to swap out where the CSS is located for the email
version:
http://unh.edu/news/campusjournal/index.cfm?type=email
The rendered code is then tweaked slightly and then pasted into our bulk
mailer application.
Yeah, crazy isn’t it?
Any feedback would, of course, be greatly appreciated.
http://www.boston.com
If I may, add another one that I am working on that I’m stumped with bugs. Looks good in Firefox, but my oh my in IE….
http://www.textoselivros.com.br/novo/indice.php
You’re welcome to review either http://www.beautyandmain.com or http://www.conwaydevelopmentsales.com and let me know how to improve my work and enhance the design.
The Columbia University HR team is pinning a lot of hope on your ability to tell us what we can do better. Our website is evolving, but we know we have a long way to go.
As the CU HR web editor and representative of the team at An Event Apart, I am fearless about criticism of the site, as I have the most to gain from identifying our weaknesses and absolutely no egotistical ties to the code.
We are very much hoping that An Event Apart can provide us with a ground-level list of recommendations, regarding how we can better meet best practices.
As a university website, it has been worked on by many people with varying skill levels, and we’d like above all else some help deciphering what in our code is effective and what we need to scrap and start fresh.
The URL is: http://www.hr.columbia.edu/hr/index.html
Existing items we want specific help on (aside from visuals, which we have plenty of input on already – the list there most relevantly includes a better text color and getting rid of the orange):
A better way to organize a staff directory, if one exists – easier to update, less cumbersome. Right now the pages at http://www.hr.columbia.edu/hr/aboutus/ourteam/hrdir/group-dir.html pull in the individual contacts, which is great when we need to update one person in several places, but terribly time-consuming when we need to update several people.
A saner menu structure; we want to get rid of the table at the top and give ourselves a new top menu with a way to assign a different color to each department.
A more effective way to host forms – same issue as the directory.
Items on our wish list for which we hope your team can make recommendations – for starting points, other options, etc. We are open to suggestions, don’t hold back!
We want more (read: any) video.
In response to the community, we would like to be able to offer secure forms.
Easier global updates.
We use Hypercontent 2.0 (http://hypercontent.sourceforge.net/contributors/index.html) as our CMS; my hunch is that we are not using it to its full potential. Can you also help us identify how we can better take advantage of this CMS? (As Hypercontent is a Columbia project, we would love to be able to continue to use it, but if something else inexpensive and better is available, please let us know.)
But if I must, then one I’d point at may be:
http://www.orangebikes.co.uk/
Very much a “needs must” site, bolted together with less time
than I’d like, and definitely a long way a CSS design
masterpiece, but it gets the job done. But, it could always be better.
http://willemlange.com/
http://blackswan.us/
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