What do you think?
School of Engineering
Weatherhead School of Management

I could spend most of my day listing things that are wrong with it... Major complaints starting at the top and working down.

Top navbar:
- Decapitated Case logo next to "Home" which doesn't even go to Case's home page
- Boring green mouseovers

Title bar:
- No clear space above/below logo, it looks like it got squeezed into some stock template
- The logo cuts off the bottom of the 8 and 6 in 1826 (this is actually the case with all logo files on the marketing site, you'd think someone would have noticed by now)
- School name is a flash object for some reason
- The sunburst is just out of place and/or tacky

Flash photo rotator:
- I'm still undecided on this...

Left navbar:
- Flyouts are just annoying
- Flyouts remain even on inner pages, obscuring access to material related to the current site
- On CSE site, the subitems on the flyout get wider when hovered over

Center content area:
- Not much to comment on here
- CSE should have been able to find better photos

Right column:
- Apparently this is where we meet the diversity quota by posting photos of Asian Americans
- No continuity between the two sites

Bottom signoff:
- Lack of continuity again (though CSE's looks better)
- No contact information specific to the content of the page, just the generic Case contact information
- "Located in Cleveland, Ohio, Case Western Reserve University is one of the nation’s top research universities." seriously?! That just seems weak.

Interior pages:
- The top photo is way too large for an interior page, plus they keep getting reused
- People will put shitty pictures that are then blown up to be that big and it will just look like hell (see http://weatherhead.case.edu/career/employers/)
- The aspect ratio is not conducive to most photos (see http://weatherhead.case.edu/initiatives/health-systems-management/)
- Overall layout allows for even less personalization than the existing templates

Well, I'd be more concerned with the inconsistency between the different schools. Look at these:

http://law.case.edu/
http://casemed.case.edu/
http://fpb.case.edu/


I especially like that the law school's mini-logo isn't the same.

But to be fair...it could be worse:

http://art.yale.edu/Home

Anonymous (in post 29877):

Well, I'd be more concerned with the inconsistency between the different schools. Look at these:
http://law.case.edu/
http://casemed.case.edu/
http://fpb.case.edu/


I especially like that the law school's mini-logo isn't the same.

But to be fair...it could be worse:

http://art.yale.edu/Home

Well obviously the first two are based on the sample that was being distributed for the new Case website, and the last three are based on the old templates.

Anonymous (in post 29876):

Top navbar:
- Decapitated Case logo next to "Home" which doesn't even go to Case's home page
- Boring green mouseovers

Did they change something? On the Engineering page, the logo does go home. It is different on Weatherhead.

I like the green.

Anonymous (in post 29876):

I could spend most of my day listing things that are wrong with it... Major complaints starting at the top and working down.
Top navbar:
- Decapitated Case logo next to "Home" which doesn't even go to Case's home page
- Boring green mouseovers

No probs here. (using FF3/Mac & Safari). The 'boring green'-ness of the mouseovers doesn't bother me, the one-pixel shift upward does (too subtle to bother doing on purpose, and goes the wrong way anyway--if there is any movement, it should be down 1 px. to imply button pushing/selecting)

Quote:

Title bar:
- No clear space above/below logo, it looks like it got squeezed into some stock template
- The logo cuts off the bottom of the 8 and 6 in 1826 (this is actually the case with all logo files on the marketing site, you'd think someone would have noticed by now)

Agree; 1-2 px. of dark blue margin on top would balance the logo much better. The 1826 cutoff is really aggravating; good thing Case doesn't have a graphic design program to which we are trying to attract students.

Quote:

- School name is a flash object for some reason
- The sunburst is just out of place and/or tacky

No flash here (according to Firefox 3 + FlashBlock plugin). The sunburst isn't too bad. The utter bogosity of rendering the school's name in Firefox is nasty (dark blue on an indigo background??) and needs to be fixed--Safari shows it as a nice, readable white text.

Quote:

Flash photo rotator:
- I'm still undecided on this...

I'm not--the CSE version is utterly loathsome (I had to break down and install FlashBlock just so I wouldn't see that bleeping wind turbine spinning in a background window while typing this); WSOM rates a mere 'annoying' by virtue of not animating the actual content, only the transitions.

Quote:

Left navbar:
- Flyouts are just annoying
- Flyouts remain even on inner pages, obscuring access to material related to the current site
- On CSE site, the subitems on the flyout get wider when hovered over

Meh. I didn't see anything really bothersome, though I'd like to see some alignment tweaks for the flyouts.

Quote:

Center content area:
- Not much to comment on here
- CSE should have been able to find better photos

Right column:
- Apparently this is where we meet the diversity quota by posting photos of Asian Americans
- No continuity between the two sites

?? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?! Perhaps we need to fire the Asian(-American?) Dean of CSE and replace him with a "real" American? And the WSOM page (at least the version I'm looking at now) is Wonderbread(R)(TM)-white. *sigh* I though we got past this petty nonsense years ago...

As for continuity...the main pages are pretty much identical: graphical link to some highlighted content, and current events-ish stuff below. Sub-pages seem to be using it for page-appropriate content (related links) or random filler pictures (only mildly annoying).

Quote:

Bottom signoff:
- Lack of continuity again (though CSE's looks better)
- No contact information specific to the content of the page, just the generic Case contact information
- "Located in Cleveland, Ohio, Case Western Reserve University is one of the nation’s top research universities." seriously?! That just seems weak.

Page-specific contact info: highly desirable, but historically a royal pain to maintain in a usable form.

Agreed 110% on the "top research universities" schlock. Reads way too much like the boilerplate at the end of a typical corporate press release.

Footer layout looks the same except for some styling inconsistencies (on the CSE page? but Weatherhead is broken in Firefox 3, text overlaps).

Quote:

Interior pages:
- The top photo is way too large for an interior page, plus they keep getting reused
- People will put shitty pictures that are then blown up to be that big and it will just look like hell (see http://weatherhead.case.edu/career/employers/)
- The aspect ratio is not conducive to most photos (see http://weatherhead.case.edu/initiatives/health-systems-management/)
- Overall layout allows for even less personalization than the existing templates

Again, strongly agree on the first 3 points. Don't agree on the "less personalization" part though--it looks to me pretty much like what we have today: fixed top banner, content-specific navigation on the left, main content in the center, more page-specific "stuff" on the right (which I suspect can be removed by a sufficiently motivated page designer, much like the old page layouts).

The BHGs (Big Honkin' Graphics, point 1) really do hurt here. They seem to be optional--see e.g. Dean Tien's Welcome page--but they are definitely over-used, at least on the CSE site.

Back to technical issues--the CSE site has some nasty layout bugs in FireFox 3; it looks like some CSS rules are missing or not being applied correctly (headings are in the wrong(?) font, content sometimes overlaps (main content area is shifted up into the border around the Flash area, Dean Tien's link is overlapping the text above it).

Overall, I have to go with a favorite expression of one of my friends: "It's not tragic." A few cosmetic tweaks, fix the CSS bugs...then the only thing left is getting the Flash content/BHG area under control (but I very much doubt that that is a winnable battle ).

Egads, I was wrong--a quick look with the OLPC XO reveals all of the Flash-based static text. What a nightmare!

Opera 9.5 (Mac) shows blank white rectangles for some of the Flash static text (school name at the top, large university name at the bottom). Much to my disappointment, the animation still works

Original Poster back to rant again:

James Nauer:

No probs here. (using FF3/Mac & Safari). The 'boring green'-ness of the mouseovers doesn't bother me, the one-pixel shift upward does (too subtle to bother doing on purpose, and goes the wrong way anyway--if there is any movement, it should be down 1 px. to imply button pushing/selecting)

By decapitated I meant it is just the "sunburst" part, without the word mark. This close to the full version of the logo it just looks redundant. I'd noticed the pixel shift and forgot to mention it (was distracted by other atrocities.

James Nauer:

As for continuity...the main pages are pretty much identical: graphical link to some highlighted content, and current events-ish stuff below. Sub-pages seem to be using it for page-appropriate content (related links) or random filler pictures (only mildly annoying).

By continuity, I meant visually. WSOM guy's photo has a few pixels of padding within the rounded rectangle frame, Dean Tian's does not. Tian's photo also has the "Look, I can make it look like the sticker is peeling off the photo, but oops, I cut off the bottom and right two pixels (seriously, is there a shortage of lower pixels on images around here?!)" thing (can you tell I hate it?), WSOM does not. CSE's events are separated by dotted lines, WSOM's are not. WSOM's photo does not have an alt text defined.

James Nauer:

Page-specific contact info: highly desirable, but historically a royal pain to maintain in a usable form.
Agreed 110% on the "top research universities" schlock. Reads way too much like the boilerplate at the end of a typical corporate press release.

Footer layout looks the same except for some styling inconsistencies (on the CSE page? but Weatherhead is broken in Firefox 3, text overlaps).

With a dynamic scripting language, page-specific contact information should be easy. Hack together something to look at a config file at the directory level and pull contact info from that (ASP.net's web.config is an example). I'm sure someone could put together something similar in PHP for the main campus Web server.

We're a research university, shouldn't we be used to citing our sources. As tacky as it would be, even having "top research universities" link to some 'accolades' page that lists awards and rankings we've received. Ditto with "One of the top engineering schools in the WORLD" on CSE's site ("world" is actually capitalized in the source).

WSOM's footer does appear to just be broken (it looks a little better in FF2, but is just horrid in FF3).

James Nauer:

Again, strongly agree on the first 3 points. Don't agree on the "less personalization" part though--it looks to me pretty much like what we have today: fixed top banner, content-specific navigation on the left, main content in the center, more page-specific "stuff" on the right (which I suspect can be removed by a sufficiently motivated page designer, much like the old page layouts).

I just found the Dean's page (http://www.engineering.case.edu/about/welcome.shtml). This is what the interior pages should look like. No BHG to deal with and a big content area in which to customize a site. The BHG plus three columns motif works for a main page, but it limits the internal layout too much. The float:right photo of Tian would look horribly out of place under a BHG.



Does anyone know if these were 'officially sanctioned' implementations of the new templates? There are enough inconsistencies between them that I'm think/hoping not. The lack of inner page templates (except for Dean Tian's page, I haven't found any non-BHG pages) is also a bit disturbing.

Anonymous (in post 29892):

Does anyone know if these were 'officially sanctioned' implementations of the new templates? There are enough inconsistencies between them that I'm think/hoping not. The lack of inner page templates (except for Dean Tian's page, I haven't found any non-BHG pages) is also a bit disturbing.

I am guessing these are tests in progress. There is no other explanation of why two different schools rolled out similar pages at the same time.

Anonymous (in post 29873):

What do you think?
School of Engineering
Weatherhead School of Management

to be honest, both look like hastily modded WordPress installs.

Anonymous (in post 29877):

But to be fair...it could be worse:
http://art.yale.edu/Home

Yeah, Yale has had pretty much the same website since 2000. Back then it was awesome. Now it's pretty meh.