Martin's BCIM Website Blog

After my meeting a while ago with Ellie R. (Student Marketing Officer) she sent me the following summary of what she feels we need to do to the BCIM Faculty website to improve it, and in particular to bring it more in line with the new (?) corporate image.

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Thanks for your time last week it was nice to meet you.  As promised I've 
pulled together some suggestions on the BCIM website. As discussed it is the 
long-term aim to effectively tie in the four faculty websites and any other 
LSBU website for specific courses into the corporate template to ensure 
consistency and enhance the LSBU brand. 

Areas to consider on existing BCIM website...

(1) Use LSBU banner template, LSBU web team to provide - this can be adapted to 
give BCIM website faculty identity, e.g. change green background colour.  

(2) Use corporate fonts on site to tie into corporate LSBU site.

(3) Preferred logo is the two line version.

(4) Confusion over whether to choose the 'Academic Programme links' or the 
'Programme Areas' links from home page, (current layout reflects faculty 
structure, possibly for website look at simplifying the faculty structure to 
make the site more user friendly). 

(5) Content heavy on some pages.  Could look at breaking areas up more and 
remove duplication on course information on LSBU online prospectus on main 
site.  

(6) Pages are slightly inconsistent in lay out e.g. on Programme in Business 
links from course titles go through to other internal pages with more info 
rather than LSBU main site whilst on the Accounting page - link from homepage 
on left (Programme Areas) - lists courses at the top without links to further 
information, then duplicates these courses below with links back through to the 
LSBU main site.

(7) On certain browsers e.g. Internet Explorer 5, content is accessible but 
loses formatting.

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This was my response...

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Thanks for summarising the main points arising out of our meeting.
Here's some feedback in relation to a couple of the points you raised.

Using the LSBU banner...
As I mentioned, this is not something we can do easily. Also, I feel
very strongly that the Faculty web managers (or whatever our correct
titles are) should have an opportunity to influence the design of any
banner or template that we are asked to work with.

Faculty "associated" websites...
It's true that the current National Bakery School website looks
inconsistent with the main BCIM Faculty website, but - as I told you -
we have almost finished the re-design. The draft is here if you'd like
to see it:
http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/bcimbd/nbs/
We have also re-designed some of our other associated websites to get
them all looking consistent with our main site, as you can see:
http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/languagecentre/
http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/cibs/
http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/bcim/cgcm/
http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/bcim/fotf/

Although it may seem that I'm being less than fully cooperative, I do
agree that we must move towards greater consistency, and I'm sure that
we can all work well together to achieve it. On the other hand I'm
sure that you can appreciate not only the huge amount of work which we
have put into our websites but also the strong sense of pride that we
have in them (and that's not just personal pride on my part!). Any
re-design must maintain or improve the quality of our web pages in
terms of their "look and feel" etc. as well as addressing the issue of
"brand integrity", otherwise it'll be a retrograde step.

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I subsequently had a meeting with David P. to discuss Ellie's points...

1. He said that the exact format for faculty banners etc. hadn't been decided yet, and none of the other faculties had yet started work on revising their sites. I said I would have a think about it (see next blog entry!). Here are the new LSBU corporate colours; changing the colour scheme shouldn't be a problem. We also discussed the idea of having a left-hand sub-navigation block within all of our pages, in the style of the main website. The main LSBU website is now in the process of being converted to the new style, using RedDot templates (RedDot being the Content Management System which LSBU has bought; as I noted at the bottom of this blog entry.) David suggested that his team could prepare RedDot templates for us to use in the future. He said that no decision has yet been made about whether or not we will have to use RedDot.
    
2. The corporate web font face is Arial, unfortunately; personally I would have preferred Verdana, which we use at the moment, or Trebuchet!
    
3. I asked David (after the meeting, via email) whether we could use this two-line version of the logo which I've seen on some of printed stationery as well as on several LSBU web pages... ...but David said no, we need to use this version:
    
4. It's true that our standard home page is confusing, because the ralationship between Programme Areas and Academic Depts within BCIM is non-trivial. I did discuss this with Geoff when putting together the first version of our home page; the question was how much prominence to give our Academic Depts, since they're really just a management structure and of little interest to existing or prospective students. However, Geoff felt that we ought to list the Depts on the home page. I think I'll need to raise this issue with him again!
    
5. The suggestion here is that we ought to link directly to the online prospectus for info about specific courses rather than having our own pages for these courses. This is an issue that David P. has raised in the past. Perhaps we ought to do this, although I notice that the AHS Faculty also have their own pages for their own courses.
    
6. The main point here, I think, is that - in spite of what I've said immediately above - sometimes we do just link straight to the online prospectus pages for detailed course information. The reason for this is historical; in the ex- School of Computing we had a page within our website for each of our courses, but in the ex- Business School they didn't have pages for any of their courses. We've been gradually adding pages for many of the ex- Business School courses, but we haven't added pages for all of them.
    
7. It's true that our pages don't look great when using IE5/IE5.5 (I just double checked using these stand-alone versions of IE), but according to the w3schools.com browser statistics, IE5/IE5.5 usage is now (July 2006) down to 4.2%, from 13.2% in July 2004. (I've referred to this site a couple of times in previous blog entries, and I now notice that the figures I quoted at the time don't match the figures they show now! Perhaps they revise their statistics as more evidence becomes available. I can't think why else the figures should change.) Given that IE7 and Windows Vista are now in the final stages of Beta testing (?), IE5/IE5.5 usage is surely going to continue to dwindle away. If it was easy to get our pages looking better in IE5/IE5.5 with a quick fix that would be great, but I don't know of a quick fix. (There may be one, though.) Come to think of it, I'm rather surprised that nobody has complained about this before. I guess that there are probably two main reasons; (a) our website doesn't look too bad in IE5.5, although it looks a little worse in IE5, (b) users of IE5/5.5 are probably very used to seeing websites that don't look too good, and ours is probably quite acceptable by comparison to many of the other websites that they browse!