Southeast Technical Institute – Episode #279
Site Scores:
| Site | Visual | Information | Code | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southeast Technical Institute | 46 | 67 | 29 | (142/300) 47% F- |
Today’s Tip:
No matter what CMS you use there is no reason to put a link to it or your login page from your homepage or footer. It doesn’t add any value to your page and is just another item to distract your user. Secondly, exposing what CMS you use can open your site up to potential security exploits that you may not even be aware of. It is better to be safe than sorry. Your internal audiences should bookmark the login page.
Show Notes
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Tags: episode
October 28th, 2011 at 2:45 pm
Thanks for the review and all of the great information! I have been trying to get those in charge around here convinced that SharePoint isn’t the greatest and that we need a new system. Right now we are in the process of a redesign that should be coming out shortly, which should address some of these issues. Thanks again!
October 28th, 2011 at 3:31 pm
I have to disagree with you on login links, while we don’t show a login link on our university homepage, we do provide it on any content pages because our previous CMS had a seperate login location that was a big point of confusion for our users. Asking them to bookmark the page is not a solution, especially for a campus like ours where users wander between machines a lot.
As far as the security of such a move is concerned, that’s kinda silly. Most CMSes are pretty easy to discern just from page content. Check this out: http://isthissitebuiltwithdrupal.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcsumb.edu
We get scanned all the time for wordpress, joomla, and other CMS-only directories by bots looking for vulernabilities. Hiding the login form won’t help make your site more secure.
October 29th, 2011 at 12:48 pm
Derek,
I’m glad you enjoyed the review. Finding a CMS is hard, especially if there is already something in place that everyone is use to. Keep an eye on http://doteduguru.com/ we are doing a survey about CMS usage and the results should be out in a few weeks. It will be able to give you some insight in to what other institutions like and dislike about theirs.
Kevin,
Thanks for your feedback about the tip. I see how in your case the link may work for you from an internal standpoint, but from the view of an outsider it is completely not useful. In an ideal world the link shouldn’t be there, but everyones situation is different.
October 30th, 2011 at 5:11 pm
Nick:
Agreed, it’s not useful to the user whatsoever, and when we initially rolled out our new site we called it “Log in” which caused confusion that was clearly visible in our analytics. However, just switching to “Log in to edit this page” caused a steep decline in people accidentally using the link, so for sites that use a direct-login link on a page, I would recommend providing more context around or within the link as to what it does.
For a small university where most of our sites have single maintainers, the biggest complaint was “I go to the website, I see an error, I want to login, edit, and leave,” which is where the Log in link is most useful. I guess it’s a balance between confusing a user and putting up barriers to content editors, who are in our case also an admin assistant and is pressed for time.
Keep up the good work!
November 1st, 2011 at 9:31 am
Kevin,
Totally makes sense, especially if content editors have a large range of content. Have you considered only having the link show from on campus computers? I’m thinking that might be a good solution.
November 1st, 2011 at 9:32 am
Nick,
Unfortunately that won’t work because it would mean we would have to hold two copies of every page in our varnish reverse proxy, plus when said users leave campus they would get confused
November 1st, 2011 at 9:39 am
Ah ha! Interesting way to serve up pages. Does that force them all completely static? What do you do about news and event feeds?