Page 1 of 1

Public school website

Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 2:17 pm
by LiveFree
Hello all!

My school district has, for the past few years, been having a student develop their website as part of a class at the high school. Last year in September, I took over the website from the previous (now, an alumni) student developer. Over the summer, he was paid to re-design and re-code the website. However, at the end of the summer, he accidentally wiped the webroot, so when I took the job, I had to do the coding more or less from scratch (minus the design, of which he had a backup of)

I am looking for UI/usability/functionality criticisms, but please note that this website's development was done with a bit of pressure.

http://www.grafton.k12.ma.us

Also, I am aware of the menu issues (mis-alignment and the green boxes that appear when you mouse over the tabs disappear too quickly), if anyone has suggestions to fix those, I am all ears.

Thank you for any and all comments.

Re: Public school website

Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 5:18 pm
by pickle
I'll comment on everything I notice & leave it up to you to determine whether or not it was a result of the rush or not.
  • Get rid of the dropshadows on the images. Nothing else is dropshadowed & it kind of looks like the shadows were added because they look cool, not because they fit. If you really want dropshadows, set the distance to 0 so the shadow appears equally around all sides.
  • Get rid of the angled striping on the title bars. Again - looks like it was added for a gimmick, not for usability.
  • Soften the gradient in the title bars. Make the difference between the light & dark colours less. You'd be surprised how making the gradient more subtle really makes the design snap
  • The menu's actually work pretty well, with the exception that none of the tabs work. Each of those tabs should be an active link to, if nothing else, a landing page for their category.
  • Take the bullets off the "Direct Links" and space out the individual links a bit more
  • Introduce some more colour - colour that's not bright green. A dark grey or soft blue might be nice. I'd consider moving away from that bright green entirely though.
  • Provide a 'Home' link. I know the logo is a link, but not everyone will assume that.
  • Move the page & navigation to the top or nearer the top of the page. Maybe make the "Grafton Public School" & pictures that are at the top of the homepage, a sort of header that appears at the top of every page - fill up that white space.
  • You've got some alignment issues in that the content of the pages doesn't fill the same horizontal space as the bar under the menu (which, might I add is pretty superfluous)
  • Take that mission statement off the front page. Mission statements are only around to make the people at the top feel good about themselves & remind them how to do their job. I have never, never, ever heard someone say: "This is a nice [insert type of organization], but I wonder what their mission statement is?" Completely useless on the homepage.
  • Why not put that district info under the menu rather than at the bottom of the page?
  • Take that calendar of the homepage, or change it's format quite a bit. If users want to know what's going on, they can click 'Current events'. That calendar just looks out of place.
  • Cut down the font size on the homepage to 12 or 14px - 16px looks (to me at least) like you're just trying to fill up space.
  • Increase the padding inside the news item - create some more whitespace in there.
Whenever I make lists like that, I feel a bit like a jerk - I realize you've spent lots of time on it & it's not nice to make a list of things I find wrong with it. Keep in mind that this is my opinion (albeit a good one I believe). Your site does technically work - my suggestions are only to make it better.

Re: Public school website

Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 6:57 pm
by LiveFree
@pickle, thank you for your comments - honestly, a lot of them are things I noticed once the website's hand-over to me was in progress, but not sure if they would affect the users. It is nice to know that there is something I can do to further improve the website.

Unfortunately, some of the items you listed (such as taking off the mission statements) are put on by directive of the boss man and I can't do anything about.

Re: Public school website

Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2009 10:14 am
by pickle
Tell the boss that ~pickle said not to. Maybe that'll convince him.