Ch. 3: Website critique

Background

alameda.peralta.edu is the website for a small community college in California. It utilizes a content management system purchased about four years ago with the idea that individual faculty and staff members would develop and maintain their own personal and department web pages. This is not unusual for a college website; unusual factors here are that there is no webmaster, primarily to save on costs, and initial plans to establish a district-wide protocol for posting on the site were never implemented.

Site organization and page layouts

The overall conception of the site is clear and organized. All information currently on the home page fits on a 15-inch monitor, with “Quick Links” to important information down the center of the page, events listed in a column on the right side, and links to information that the college wishes to bring to students’ attention in large print at the bottom. It is not always obvious what is and isn’t clickable.

Graphics on the home page include a header across the top of the page, used for branding and bordered by a navigation bar, and two photos of students, which serve to break up the text but don’t add information. Use of graphics in general is limited and often seems to be just to fill space. Some pages are simple and scannable, but most of the academic department sites are text heavy, often including just course listings taken directly from the college catalog.

Much of the College Information page is dated or minimally informative. The campus map is out of date, although this is not obvious from the site unless one goes deeper and compares room numbers. Some other pages have obviously not been touched for more than a year. Committees are listed, but without members’ names or meeting times.

Recommendation: Use more graphics. Choose those that support the message, and focus users on them by linking through them to relevant information.

Recommendation: Regular updates are essential, with addition of missing information.

Navigation

The site is readily accessible from the Peralta Community College District home page. Within the college site, linking down from a higher level page is usually quite easy, but there is generally no obvious way to get back to where you came from, other than the browser’s “Back” arrow in the upper left corner.

Navigation from the bar at the top of the main page is fairly straightforward, except that the navigation bar lacks drop-down lists showing what the reader can find under each topic.

In general, nearly all links are currently functional, although they may link to pages that need to be updated.

Some links are unstable, however, particularly those to the Calendar of Events. When it works, the calendar works well, with information just one click from the home page.

Occasionally, navigating the site requires excess steps. An example is the links to urls on the right side of the Chemistry page, which is otherwise well developed. Student Clubs pages, which might be important to prospective or current students, are buried in the fourth layer of the site, and how one gets there isn’t apparent.

The A-Z Index function is useful if somewhat inconsistent. Some departments have posted all of their courses here, while others have listed nothing more than the main page. Both the Search and Links functions are adequate, and the Directory seems to work, although a only small number of faculty and staff have chosen to make their personal web pages accessible through the Directory.

Recommendation: At a minimum, a “Back” link should be put on each page, as well as a “Home” link.

Recommendation: Many colleges are now centering their main navigation bar around who the visitor is rather than, as is done here, topics defined by the college. If resources become available for redesign, this change should be considered.

Recommendation: Student activities links should be made more prominent.

Consistency

The college’s home page design is consistent with that of the parent district. Layout is relatively consistent because of the limits of the content management system.

Style is very inconsistent. It is most consistent, if not very exciting, when the individual faculty member has not worked on his or her page. Some faculty with the most developed pages have bypassed the content management system and linked to Dreamweaver or WordPress pages, introducing more inconsistency. The content management system imposes consistency in fonts, but either the system or the user causes larger fonts to be crowded vertically, making them sometimes almost unreadable.

Recommendation: The problem of consistency is best dealt with from the outset of development of a website. Consistency requires some central control, which is lacking for this site. The problem might be tackled now by developing a style sheet for production of more interesting pages than most of those that exist now, and applying it to these as a model in the hope that people who are currently attached to their own page designs will be motivated to move toward that style.

Writing Quality, Tone and Voice

The writing is generally literate and informative. The “marketingese” tone often objected to by web users is largely avoided here.

Generally, pages are able to stand alone. However, a number of the academic department pages include no description of the program, but only a list of courses with no context or guidance. For programs that list just one or two courses, with no other information, one has to ask whether achieving the goal of including all courses merits the damage done by having the visitor click on useless pages.

Some programs include useful and visitor-centered information. The Dental Assisting program, for example, uses its main page for paragraphs answering anticipated questions by prospective students, with catalog information and faculty contact information listed on second-level pages.

Recommendation: Develop a template for academic department pages based on user needs and preferences, and ensure that each department includes these basics on its page.

Summary recommendations

There is much work to be done on this site. Initial emphasis should be on regular updating, consistency of style, and more effective use of graphics.

Growing up in grandma’s house

NOTE: Since my first attempt really didn’t work out, I’ve written a second “first” entry, on a different topic.

Every Saturday evening my parents dropped my younger brother and me off at our grandmother’s house. As my parents said goodbye and started the car to take off for their night of dancing, my brother and I rushed up the stairs to our weekly adventure.

Almost as soon as we could walk, we insisted on going it alone up the eight concrete steps from the sidewalk, with a pause and then up another eight wooden steps. We landed on a porch that spread, big as a living room, across the entire front of the house. At that time it held a green-cushioned porch swing, the only one we had ever seen, where we could sit and swing and feel important as we waved to the neighbors who walked by.

My grandmother’s early 1900s, three-story wood frame house was not so unusual in Portland, Oregon, where I grew up, but to me the place was magic. My grandmother lived on the first floor. Upstairs was my aunt and uncle’s apartment, except for one room that housed my bachelor great-uncle John. Another flight up was the attic. Never scary as attics are in the movies, my grandmother’s attic was a place to spend an entire day. It was filled with old children’s books, discarded musical instruments and stereoscopes and cameras, and trunks full of fabrics left over from the clothing alterations that my grandmother did for friends in order to support herself economically.

Bridge Night

Saturday was my grandmother’s bridge night. Will and Ferne, a couple who mystified us because Ferne was almost twice as big as her husband, showed up regularly. Sometimes my grandmother’s old friend Nettie was there, very grandmotherly herself in her old-lady glasses and dresses that had been altered to fit numerous times by my grandmother. Uncle John often came downstairs to join the party.

The group took bridge very seriously, and it wasn’t long before they were criticizing their partners for some cue missed or card misplayed. My brother and I didn’t mind the squabbling, because we were focused on the best part of bridge night: the candy. On each corner of the bridge table was a dish filled with hard candy and licorice and caramels, which we were allowed to share. There were also dishes of “party mix,” a concoction of Chex cereals and pretzels and nuts, which wasn’t nearly as good as the candy.

My grandmother, whose other part-time job in her 70s was teaching bridge at the local Y, kept it all under control. On the occasions when the discussion threatened to get out of control, she sent us upstairs to visit our Aunt Kate and Uncle John.

Kate and John

We called them just Kate and John, because old John was Uncle John. They didn’t have any children, but they loved children and were the favorite parents of their nieces and nephews and the neighborhood children. Kate was Irish, and said she believed in leprechauns. John was still a kid at heart, and much of what my brother and I learned as children came from sharing his hobbies. We knew how fast a model train could go around a figure eight before it fell off the track, and we knew the names of the foreign countries that had triangle-shaped postage stamps.

Usually on Saturday nights we would fall asleep before our parents returned, and they would carry their sleeping children out to the car. Once, though, we spent the whole night upstairs with Kate and John. They had a hide-a-bed in the living room, which they would sometimes open out if there was a good movie on TV. Kate’s favorite movie, “Harvey,” was on TV this night, very late. The movie starred Kate’s favorite actor, James Stewart, as Elwood P. Dowd, an eccentric small-town bachelor who is one of few people who can see and talk to the 6’3” white rabbit, Harvey.

Kate made popcorn. The hide-a-bed came out and the four of us—Kate, John, my brother Bill and I—sat side by side munching on popcorn and watching Jimmy Stewart talk to his imaginary friend until after midnight. We felt joyfully wicked: Children our age didn’t stay up till after midnight.

The House is Sold

My grandmother’s house was sold last spring. My grandmother’s generation was long gone; John had died the year before, and Kate hadn’t wanted to stay there alone. I flew up to Portland for a visit to the house before the estate sale, not so much because there were things I wanted as that I wanted to spend one last day in the attic.

While one of the nephews was busy lugging a sterling silver coffee urn down the three flights of stairs, I took out child things: a Chinese checkers game, a copy of the book The Adventures of Pinocchio missing its cover and a few outside pages, and what appeared to be a first edition of Jack London’s 1900 The Son of the Wolf its ownership proclaimed by the signature on the inside cover of the grandfather who had died before I was born. My brother insisted I take along a how-to book titled Cowboy Dances, probably something my mother had read before she met my father, at a dance, of course.

I carried my treasures down the 16 steps from the porch to the sidewalk very slowly. My grandmother’s house held memories of some of the best moments of my childhood, and had sheltered part of my family for nearly a century. Next time I go back to Portland, it will be different.