The new LSBU Health & Social Care website
The new Health & Social Care website was launched in July, and it is intended to be a model for the other faculty websites. Here are local copies (August 2007) and the current live versions of the HSC Home Page and Courses Page...| HSC Home Page - local copy | HSC Home Page - live version |
| HSC Courses Page - local copy | HSC Courses Page - live version |
In my opinion there is quite a lot of room for improvement. I sent a memo earlier today to David P and Joe H which goes into rather a lot of detail. My main points are as follows:
- The white strip at the top of the banner is wasteful in terms of screen space in my opinion. See e.g. www.brunel.ac.uk, www.bbc.co.uk for more sensibly sized top banner strips. Also, I think that a top banner strip should be consistent across all of the organization's web pages, with everything below it dependent on context, but the HSC top banner strip contains some elements that are LSBU-wide (LSBU home, Accessibility, Search LSBU) and some that are HSC-specific (Home, Contact us, Quick Links). It's not immediately evident what the various links within the top banner strip relate to. For example, is the 'Contact us' link for HSC or for LSBU? Likewise the Quick Links.
- The background image within the banner is very appealing, but - like the top strip - it is too wasteful in terms of screen space; the main navigation tabs are too far down the page in my opinion. Also, I think that the LSBU logo takes up too much horizontal space. It forces the main text within the banner to be pushed too far to the right in my opinion. I would prefer to continue to use the version of the logo that we currently use, which allows the main text to be centred, leaving space for a search box on the other side of it. Many other universities have more compact logos that don't take up so much space (see e.g. www.brunel.ac.uk, but again I could cite many other examples). Also, the LSBU logo is hyperlinked to HSC Home when it should surely be hyperlinked to LSBU Home.
- The left-most main navigation tab is conventionally a 'Home' tab, and it seems wrong to me to omit this. After following a couple of links to get inside the HSC website it's not as obvious as it should be how to get back to the HSC home page. Also, I think that there should also be some kind of mouse rollover indicator within the main navigation tabs; for example the text could be underlined when rolled over, as happens for the hyperlinks within the main body of the page. Furthermore, the tab corresponding to the section one is currently in within the HSC website should be highlighted; this is standard practice - see e.g.:
http://harbinger.sims.berkeley.edu/ui_designpatterns/webpatterns2/
webpatterns/pattern.php?id=27http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/pattern.php?pattern=navigationtabs
The left-most tab in both of these is a 'Home' tab, by the way.
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On all (?) of the HSC pages apart from the home page there is a left column which is taken up by a navigation links block. I know that this is fairly standard practice, but it throws the pages out of balance and restricts the width of the main column. Many of our BCIM pages incorporate diagrams that occupy the full width of the page, and I'm not sure how we're going to deal with these if we have to incorporate a left-hand navigation block. I would like to have the option of omitting it.
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The page footer looks like a single block of links but on closer inspection I can see that it contains two separate strips. The upper Faculty links strip repeats the banner tabs, which is fine except that therefore there's no link to HSC home. There should be! Better still, I much prefer uncluttered footers; there's no need to duplicate all of the main navigation tabs within the footer in my opinion. The lower LSBU links strip should be more clearly separated from the upper Faculty links strip in my view, to make it clear that there is a distinction between them. I see that the links within the LSBU links strip are the same on the HSC home page as they are on the LSBU home page. That's good. However, I think that there should be a link within the LSBU links strip to the LSBU home page. Also, I would have liked to see a link to the top of the page somewhere within the footer, which is also fairly standard practice.
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Many of the HSC web pages, including the home page, are undated - but shouldn't this be mandatory? Also, there doesn't seem to be a house rule on capitalisation. Many of the links have first-word only capitalisation (e.g. "Contact us") but some have every-word capitalisation (e.g. "Privacy Statement"). Similarly, there doesn't seem to be a house rule on when to use ampersand ("&"). Sometimes it is used (e.g. "Open days & visits") and sometimes it isn't (e.g. "Fees and funding"). Personally, I think that we should use "&" in preference to "and" wherever reasonable, especially on the web, because it's more concise.
- Finally, I would have expected the HSC website to have its own search facility, and I think that some users may find the lack of a search facility frustrating.