Gloating Over Broken Code

Hi, my name is Cody and I am a web designer.

This is where you would say "Hi, Cody" and then I would tell you the rest of the story, but this is the internet, so you don't say anything and I've already written the story. The times they are a'changin.

Ok, so I just finished my classes and am feeling rather giddy and free at the moment, and so in the absence of other juicy blog fodder, I'm going to diatribe on another school's website and relate it to Evergreen website. Forgive me, non-webby readers. This is going to eat five to ten minutes of your precious day, and it might even make you laugh, even if you don't understand it (or perhaps because...).

Bucknell has a lovely site, don't they? So beautiful, with it's flowing flash animation and all the pretty colors, and what fabulous functionality! (There are printer-friendly buttons, and font-size increase buttons, and icons galore, oh my!)

But let's get real.

I do very much like the design. It feels nice. I really enjoy all the graphics breaking out of their boxes (refer to the steeple-type thing on the front page for reference). And, everything seems to be done for a reason! Yay! Three cheers for deliberate design! I am particularly fond of all the widgets (like the search box--that is a widget) on the page conforming to the look/feel of the page itself. Good unity--something we seem to struggle with here at Evergreen for a number of rather trivial reasons.

Lots of nifty search features at Bucknell, like a searchable faculty/staff/student directory, multiple options for site search, etc. But the site search results page is ugly ugly! Lots of searches points to an abundance of database-driven webapps underlying the site.

People, people, everywhere. This is good. Love. People love people, it's true. Evergreen's web site needs more people. We don't have enough of our freaky hippie culturally appropriated dreadlocks on the web yet.

Something interesting we have not yet adopted: as you migrate through Bucknell's "top level" pages like admission/aid, campus life, etc., the menu on the left changes (it's what I enjoy calling "contextual"). This seems useful. And then... Click on something like course catalog on the left side menu and it pops down a big list of pretty much everything related to the catalog. This nested menu functionality is sorta equivalent to some things we have now, but it is much more accessible and elegant.

Next, breadcrumbs are lovely, but they mean developing a solid, relatively static information architecture upon which they are based. This could be valuable for Evergreen but is it applicable to our electrified, wiry-haired almalgamation of a site? Can we cram all our site's content into a relatively rigid and highly hierarchical information architecture? (Evergrog say hierarchy bad!) This would require a serious effort to strip out the administrative stuff (which is int-RA-net material, anyway) from the real web site stuff. This is a black hole-type discussion, and we're not going to cross that event horizon.

Ok, I think i'll stop there.

But one last thing before I let you escape.

For all its pretty flair and nifty info architecture, I took a look at the code and was struck by a few little flukes... the layout is table-based! (who cares, you say?! I do!) Even stranger, the document type is declared as "xhtml 1.0 strict", but this is wishful thinking since xhtml 1.0 forbids layout tables. Hmm... So I plugged in the address of the Bucknell homepage into the HTML Validator.

There are no less than four hundred seventeen validation errors, on a single, small page that is mostly images. Yikes. Count'em: that 417 errors on one little page.

So Evergreen is still one-upping them in at least one, very important department (we only have 60 errors and soon we will have none), and this makes me happy. Three cheers for schadenfreude!