Cornell University – College of Arts and Sciences – Episode #181
Site Scores:
| Site | Visual | Information | Code | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cornell University – College of Arts and Sciences | 96 | 81 | 79 | (256/300) 85% B |
Today’s Tip:
Non traditional interfaces sound like a great idea on paper but in execution not preform as expected. A simple list with a search box or filter options is the accepted way to display degrees and certificates. Anything beyond that will require some learning/exploring and some potential confusion. The last thing you want to do on your institution’s site is confuse prospective students. Make sure if you sway from the typical way to doing things that you test and re-test with your primary audience.
Show Notes:
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Tags: episode
August 18th, 2010 at 3:29 pm
Hi Nick,
Just caught up on a few episodes. Good reviews, however for someone who preaches usability so much I’m surprised to see such hate for the CMS systems out there, particularly their code. While I’ll agree completely that they definitely aren’t perfect, a little inline javascript isn’t all that bad of a thing. In fact when it comes to code, I’m rather surprised that I never see you run in through a validator. I’m often more interested in many of the CMS sites if they can pass accessibility validation or even HTML validation than I am in if their system put some code on the homepage. I run everything through W3C and http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu/ for a quick idea of whether they have a clue in their code or not as especially with the FOSS CMS systems a good coder will be able to take care of validation, etc but might not be able to do anything about certain code outputted inline.