It really annoys me...

piersk

Please excuse my rant, but some things just get my goat (so to speak)...

<rant>
As most of you know, I am still a student (albeit on placement) and am therefore part of the students' union.

(brief intro) the union website was crap. the hosting was crap and therefore a lot of it didnt work. There wasn't a web team as such, just a group of individuals (inc me of course) who wanted to rebuild it and make it good.

However, the "powers that be" (also known as Sabbs) decided, without any consultation from the web team, to make use of a company called OnCampusUK who have developed their own CMS specifically for unions.

The web team, made their disgust known and the decision was taken to the union council (made up of representatives of the union societies and who decide the running of the union) who decided that it was a good idea to go with this OCUK idea. This company charges no money for the hosting, and it gives a percentage of the ads to the union.

So then there came the design. The web team decided to come forwad and offer their help in designing the website. Nothing came about from this. The design was created by two members of the union staff who have no web background.

Then the web team offered to help add content to the website. Nothing came about from this.

So, (and I'm now getting to my point now) today the website was launched, unfinished, untested to the world.

Ok, the design is ok, but no thought has been taken into the CSS or the HTML, no matter how many emails of assistance have been sent. There is no thought behind the accessibility of the site.

In my opinion, no thought has been put into the site at all. It was created as a quick fix (bear in mind that the sabbs are only in office for a year and the contract lasts for 3 years).

</rant over>

Apologies for that. Just needed somewhere to post this.

laserlight

Seems ok.

Except that the "menu on the left hand side" doesnt work for me, both in Mozilla Firefox 0.8, and MS Internet Explorer 6.

I'm currently contemplating installing Opera to see if there's any difference.

piersk

Give it time to load up.

Thats something I forgot to add: the time it takes to load a page - too long IMO

laserlight

That's bad, I'm supposed to be on broadband.

piersk

At work we have a 2 MB ADSL connection and it was taking anything up to about 10 secs for the page to load.

To me, thats crap.

goldbug

Originally posted by laserlight
That's bad, I'm supposed to be on broadband.

Took approximately 8 seconds for me to load (avg. 6.2mbit/s as tested (with concurrent mp3 streaming and remote server connections)).

If 8 seconds is the supposed attention span limit people will put up with waiting for a page to load, and my connection speed is over 100x faster than an optimal 56k connection.... it would load a LOT slower for a modem user (assuming data transfer is the bottleneck). That would be unacceptable in my book if I was using a modem (it's still unacceptable w/ broadband)... but I guess one could argue that most Universities provide their students (on-campus at least) with some sort of high-speed network, thus negating speed issues.

I'm not bored or anything 😃

piersk

Originally posted by goldbug
but I guess one could argue that most Universities provide their students (on-campus at least) with some sort of high-speed network, thus negating speed issues.

But guess which Uni doesn't at the moment...

goldbug

Originally posted by piersk
But guess which Uni doesn't at the moment...

d'oh!

piersk

indeed

bubblenut

Well, if you've got the time and feel like being bitter you could mark it. No not hack it and leave obscene messages 😉, take a page and mark how well they would have done if they'd handed that in as a piece of work. Is it obvious I'm just sat in front of my computer with nothing to do?

weekender

funny that - exactly the same thing happened to me about a year ago. I was in talks with the deputy president of my old students union, and he told me he was impressed with my work and was going to talk to the others, and the job of doing a new content-managed website was as good as mine.

a week later i chase up, and one of the staff has given the job to someone else - his dad! This then fell through, and the task went to two of the SU staff (who, like yours, are only in 1 year jobs).

Soon after, www.thesu.com was launched - not a bad site, if anything was linked. eg my friend works hard photographing all the weekly nightclubs for the website and has done for a year - but there is no way of getting to her photos unless you know a direct url.

anyway, i'm out of uni forever muhahaha - and my student card is still valid for another 18 months!

adam

piersk

hmmm.... that oxford brookes website looks familiar 😉

Thats another thing that bugs me. if you look here, you'll see that the majority of the sites look pretty much the same (in terms of layout)

Elizabeth

Originally posted by piersk
hmmm.... that oxford brookes website looks familiar 😉

Thats another thing that bugs me. if you look here, you'll see that the majority of the sites look pretty much the same (in terms of layout)

Woah! Even THAT page took forever to load- I stopped at 15-20 seconds and it still had 39 images to load (plus a few broken ones). Maybe they figure the student unions must have a lot of spare time on their hands, so they don't mind waiting 5 minutes for the images to load.

weekender

maybe this is the start of something beautiful - a sourceforge project for student union websites?

piersk

Originally posted by weekender
maybe this is the start of something beautiful - a sourceforge project for student union websites?

Funny you should mention that. About 18 months ago two members of the aforementioned web team set up this on sourceforge and then nothing more really happened. Perhaps if you contact one of the two admins, you might nudge them into starting it up again.

stolzyboy

just a little tidbit... the menu was taken from here: www.burmees.nl

piersk

Actually, the whole site design was taken from here (bear in mind where the University is...)

stolzyboy

that may be, but they got the menu from the burmees site

piersk

Although it looks like it, if you look at the source code of the page, you will see that it's different.

stolzyboy

Originally posted by piersk
Although it looks like it, if you look at the source code of the page, you will see that it's different.

it may be slightly different, but it IS from burmees.nl... i've used this menu a hundred times and it IS that one... especially when it says "Menu Ready for Use" that is direct from burmees, and the naming of the working JS file menu_com.js, that is also directly from burmees... the use of arrays, the function Go(){return}, it is all from there 😉