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University of Virginia – Episode #33

Site Scores:

Site Visual Information Code Overall
University of Virginia 93 89 82 (264/300) 88% B+

Today’s Tip:

Initially only load the content the user is interacting with or at least has a 50% chance of interacting with.  The less data that has to come over the wire the quicker pages will load, studies have shown users will stay on a site longer if the pages load quickly.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 10:39 pm and is filed under episode. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “University of Virginia – Episode #33”

  1. Randy Jensen Says:
    January 9th, 2009 at 8:04 pm

    When I first saw this site, I was seriously impressed. The design was really, really beautiful (even if it looks like the got some serious ‘inspiration’ from apple.com) and it seemed to function quite well. However, the more I used the site, the less I liked it.

    While the ‘Prospective Students’, ‘Current Students’, etc. links are cute, they are ultimately useless (and annoying) to a repeat visitor. There is great content for a first time user, but when you come back, I now have to click once to expand and twice to actually go to the page I want.

    Having two slideshows right next to each other and almost immediately on the top of the page is very distracting as well. There is also some artifacting that happens when you click on the links to the right for the news and events.

    I just got done having our site looked at by a blind person using JAWS and knowing what I know now, I think this site would be incredibly hard for her/person with a disability to navigate.

    Then we get to the massive amounts of CSS and JS being loaded. While the page size was not what you would call excessive, that is a TON of HTTP requests to be making. Their server has got to be in some serious pain with all of that loading on the most hit page of their site.

    Although it sounds like I now hate this site, it’s quite the opposite. I think they’re really on to something here and maybe they know something about their audience that I don’t. It just seems like they found something good (JS) and didn’t know when to quit. The page is inviting when you first see it, but once you start to use it, it gets a bit overwhelming. Tone it up a bit and work on the IA and I think this is easily a site that will be benchmarked against for quite some time. TU

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