E.J. Pratt Library – Victoria University – Episode #324
Site Scores:
| Site | Visual | Information | Code | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| E.J. Pratt Library – Victoria University | 95 | 93 | 90 | (278/300) 93% A |
Show Notes
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Tags: episode
July 26th, 2012 at 8:18 am
Thank you Nick for an excellent review!
As the web designer/developer for this website, here’s my response to your questions:
1. Does the submit slider (Ask Us page) work without the mouse?
I’m afraid not. Spambots nowadays are very good at keyboard inputs. CAPTCHA is the norm but users hate them.
The slider is a good alternative because it’s simple to use for the users but difficult for the machines.
2. How does the change option in the search box work?
jQuery, using the click event to flip the attributes back and forth.
3. How come the Quick Links are not in alphabetical order?
Yes, the ordering is based on importance. However, going the A-Z route doesn’t do the trick either (see article: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/alpha-sorting.html). That’s why we kept the lists short and easy to read.
4. How come the site doesn’t use mailto: for emails?
We get a lot of spam mails and we have tried everything to fight them off but with no luck. It left us no choice other than removing them altogether. It hurts a bit on the experience side but the Ask Us page compensates it.
5. Is this site hand coded or CMS driven?
No CMS was used on the re-design (lots of hand coding and developed a simple page generator/converter for really “messy” pages). Our resources are limited, it is not feasible to do a re-design and set up the CMS at the same time.
6. The headings take a while to load. Why?
As mentioned in the video, we are indeed using a font replacement technique called SIFR. Since it uses Flash, there’s a bit of penalty on the loading time. It was acceptable at the time we were re-designing the site. After several upgrades (operating system, browser and flash player), we have reached to a point that we need an alternative solution. We might use font-face as the successor but we want to test that a bit more before proceeding.
7. How come the external links all point to a hash (“#”) tag in the source?
We use jQuery to update the external links. Of course, we can also use search and replace to update the links but it’s not feasible. Note that our site is not CMS driven so we have to be very careful when we make a global change.
July 30th, 2012 at 10:32 am
Abraham,
Thanks for the awesome response!
Here are my thoughts:
1. #sadface but I understand. I hope you can come up with an accessible solution soon.
2. Nice.
3. Thanks for the insight.
4. I think they only sure way against spam is having a good server side software on your end.
5. Understandable.
6. It’d put this as priority #1. Just saying.
7. Have you thought about the impact this has on SEO?
September 19th, 2012 at 11:40 pm
Good tip. I own a blog myself and get confronted with such comments. I hope you don’t consider mine as spam though.Berry