This brings up an important point - DON'T USE an imagemap for the
sidebar unless you can supply alt tags; a table with simple images would
work just as well.
I don't think we need to restrict the page to sixteen colors so it will
look nice in some of the GA labs. These will eventually be upgraded
anyway to at least 256 colors, and most other users will have at least
that resolution on their machines.
In terms of size, the opening table is only 605x488: even monitors with
a 640x480 resolution, should be able to see pretty much the whole thing
(they'll have a vertical scrollbar, but that's OK). Users may have to
maximize the Netscape screen, but so what? One idea though, might be to
make the table a relative window width, instead of a static pixel size
(unless resizing does wierd bad things to the spacing).
The opening graphic is only 47k - well within acceptable graphic size
parameters for an opening page like this. I could image a useful
imagemap HERE instead of the static graphic, but that could be phased in
over time.
In terms of access time from home, I don't think the times that Tadson
Bussey posted are out of line (though they are idealized times --
websitegarage simply looks at total size and divides by access speed -
thus, not accounting for heavy traffic, bad connection speed, etc).
So, I don't think access speed is an issue anymore -- many of the sites
that these "high-schoolers" are looking at (other university homepages,
South Park, NFL.com, whatever) take as long or longer to load. Users can
be remarkably patient if there's a pay-off at the end (such as looking
at a potential university). In most cases, the page loads in under a
minute, and that's probably OK.
One other small note - the alignment on the right side of the table is
off. The easiest way to fix this is to make the background of the entire
table black.
This site seems a LOT more functional than the current home page, and
seems to better accomplish representing the university and serving as a
portal to the virtual university space. I REALLY like the redundant
navigation tool; they alone make the new site worth it.
One final issue: we need to clarify this whole search engine thing.
First, are we all comfortable in having commercial advertisements
assault ourselves and our students every time we want to search the NIU
site? Surely, we can manage to write our own CGI search script! Also, we
(faculty, et al) need to understand how this search engine works - what
does it look for? I tried to do a search for some on-line classes and
found nothing. How do we make sure our sites are included in the search
index? Some on-line and printed instructions on this would be very
helpful.
--Eric Hoffman
PS - The "about this web-site" link probably need not be so prominent,
but it is an essential link here, as it explains the differences between
the old and the new sites, and where to find certain kinds of info on
the new site.