Tennessee Technological University – Episode #243
Site Scores:
| Site | Visual | Information | Code | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tennessee Technological University | 76 | 83 | 70 | (229/300) 76% C |
Today’s Tip:
There is no need, absolutely no need to have a link to your CMS administration area on the footer of every page. Not only does it add a link that doesn’t serve the user but could potentially open your site up to vulnerabilities. The CMS you use may be pretty secure but giving just anyone the front door to edit anything on your .edu domain is dangerous. You should only make the URL aware to the selected few who would be using it, outside of that there is no need.
Show Notes:
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Tags: episode
April 29th, 2011 at 8:56 am
Full disclosure, I’m a TTU graduate, Bachelor of Science in Web Design, 2007.
Keep in mind the weather just killed around 300 of us in the south east. So we tend to take it pretty seriously. 0_o
The mega menu thing isn’t just you. I was noticing that just the other day (I troll other TN college/university websites on a regular basis). The spacing almost feels like they’re trying to leave room for touch interfaces or something. But I’m not sure if all that space is a hit area or not. It has a :hover effect, but that could be applied to the container rather than to the full link. And why mix mouse driven drop downs with touch interface spacing?
And I agree that the effect they are using for the audience based boxes (Is there a name for that UI effect? Almost-but-not-quite-accordion?) could have been used for some of the other areas, such as the icons that open in a model window, and resulted in an overall more effective use of space.
Acalog, the online catalog provider most of us in TN use, doesn’t yet provide an API to do the sort of “display this one page or section of catalog content in your CMS template” functionality you’re talking about. Or at least they don’t at whatever service level we’re paying for. The model they run under is more like “dress up our CMS template to look a lot like your CMS template”. I think we could do a db extract from their system and dump it into whatever we’re running, but then we’ve got fractured content. The ideal situation would be the catalog content “lives” in a single location but can be cross-published several different places. As it stands we don’t even get permalinks to a given program’s curriculum guide. When the 2011-2012 catalog goes live, the link you clicked to get to that page (and every other such link scattered around the site) will have to be updated.
But so I don’t sound like I’m just bashing Acalog, the in-context course descriptions are pretty cool, and we can actually get some analytic data as to how people are using that portfolio feature. It has some awesome elements. But it also has some missing features that could make integrating it into a core web presence much easier.
The visual score in the video doesn’t match what’s on this page, just a heads up.