Ancient Mac, 28kbps modem; colors decent but not great, time to load 1'40".
I know it's easy to criticize what someone else did, but I do have a big
problem with some of the choices made. I appreciate the effort though,
and I assure you that it's impossible to please everyone, so read on
with light heart.
Why is "About the new page" so prominent? Who cares? Why is the graphic
side so cluttered? Way too much detail - if you must use photographs,
use more abstract, minimalistic ones. Why is there no "Support services",
a very useful route to ACS and such? Why are the imagemaps duplicated in
ASCII below? Like driving a Porsche with a sidecar. Why are alumni first?
Statistically they will be the _least_ likely to use the page. The head
banner looks like it's from a cover of "Soviet Agriculture". The whole
thing is wider than the default Netscape window on all platforms I tried.
In the Sun version the photos are narrower than the top and bottom bars,
very ugly (probably Netscape bug, but why not have a single image and
avoid the alignment/scaling). The red-on-black is very hard to read. The
piano looks like a hippo attacking a poor spaniel.
I know I'm nitpicking, but let me repeat myself: let the form follow
function! The Web is about distributing information, not "presenting"
it. Think about four or five categories of viewers (faculty and staff,
students, visitors, alumni or some such) and give each a separate area.
Ask some of those people what they look for most often and provide that
in each of those areas. Have a _good_ search engine featured prominently
everywhere. And don't overload any page with links and information! I
felt overwhelmed by the layouts which make the eye jump randomly. I'm
still used to reading ordinary books...
All this reminds me of the experiment Kernighan et al. reportedly did
when they were developing Unix-to-be: they wrote a text editor which,
when the AT&T office staff used it, would lock up once in a while and
then gather statistics on what people typed to get out. Whatever two
most common phrases were recorded became the real "quit" commands. This
is how GUI design should be done, I think. Maybe you can learn from the
server's logs as to what people really want from the site.
-- Eric Behr | NIU Mathematical Sciences | (815) 753 6727 behr@math.niu.edu | http://www.math.niu.edu/~behr/ | fax: 753 1112