Tyndale University College & Seminary – Episode #180
Site Scores:
| Site | Visual | Information | Code | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tyndale University College & Seminary | 76 | 88 | 70 | (234/300) 78% C+ |
Today’s Tip:
Data consistency throughout your site is crucial to your prospective students and administration. “Write once, publish many” should be a goal every web department should be concerned with. Each semester as numbers change or course descriptions and requirements change it is important to invest the time up front on tools that make the update process easy.
Show Notes:
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Tags: episode
August 23rd, 2010 at 8:33 am
Nick – thanks for the review – I guess we passed enough that I can keep my Web Rockstar wristband!
I appreciate your comments and for the most part they are realistic. Some things we have slated for change already. We have a set of usability tests this week based on changes in the global navigation – I said Nick said it was a bad idea to go that deep but apparently they still wanted usability testing
When we relaunched I was battling design by committee (I won some battles) but hopefully with testing results we can revamp the global nav without too many issues.
We are using Drupal – I do love it though it is a huge change in mindset from our old hand-coded CMS (http://educheckup.com/2008/11/14/tyndale-university-college-seminary-episode-16/) – Some times you just have to work with the system. Drupal spits out a lot of code and adds classes like crazy and then relies on you to reduce the code to what you want – this can be very powerful in the themeing layer. I am more used to (and prefer) an additive system where you add what you need and only what you need.
Some of the issues on the front page have more to do with implementation of the theme in Drupal. The rotator drives me nuts – doesn’t even work properly – we have plans to remove this and implement something similar to how we have it on http://www.tyndale.ca/foundation and relocate the Audience based nav to make more room for bling!
We are a small team – rebuilt the site with a one man team (now 3) with some out-sourced help. There will always be things to fix/add/change with limited time to do so – ah – job security
Thanks for pointing out some things we can work on.
-Andy
PS. I have called Windows 95 and told them they can have their buttons back – they were wondering where they went
August 23rd, 2010 at 9:01 am
…also – the side-bar app has been quite interesting – our content guy has been looking at some stats with it – I’ll send some your way. We do get a lot of spam with it – they are fairly easy to weed out and I should try to implement some spam protection on it – it is not really integrated into Drupal (nor is our app) so I am looking to do that outside of Drupal. In all of our usability tests people saw the app right away and used that form over our traditional entry point. A nice call to action that is ready when they are…