Video Project: Brainstorming

Here are a couple of preliminary ideas for the video project:

Sports: we can create a video documenting aspects of the different sports played in the first term. This could include, rugby, soccer, track and field, etc. More specifically, we could take the video from a closer perspective to show people what St. Georges sports is about.

Music and Arts: we can film the band playing and the art classes (e.g. ceramics), and edit it to introduce the arts program in the school, as well as highlighting the more unique aspects.

Grad Life: the various aspects of grad life is not very well documented. For example, many people have no idea of what goes on inside the prefect council and their committees. As well, many grads also volunteer in stuff ranging from pizza sells to peer tutoring. This video could explore the school from the grad perspective and shed light to newcomers what their last year is all about.

Of course there are many challenges to be met in these ideas. For example, most first term sports are ending, and many of the games aren't played in the school. As well, it also takes a lot of time to film the concert band or the leadership committee meetings. Since there is obviously limited time, further planning to limit the scope and to storyboard should probably start soon.

First Looks at St George's New Website

Apparently, St. George's School has now redesigned its website.

The new home page definitely looks much more simple and fresh, with the huge photo slide show. The two links at the bottom also helps to direct you to the right location whether you are a student in the school or whether you are applying to the school.

However, a few things immediately jump out at me. First of all, the school seems to be afraid of its logo! On contrary to most other websites, the logo is a tiny image found right at the bottom of the page. Without the complement of the logo, the header looks like it is lacking something. Secondly, I'm still not exactly sure whether they would continually update the photo slide show with new images, especially now they've removed the photo selection bar to hide the scarce number (6) of photos that were put on! If that does not happen regularly, these photos will soon get old too!


The "my" Theme and the "my Saints" Page

Apparently, due to the horrendous drop down menu disaster of the previous website, this redesign has completely done away with them. Instead, everything is now listed on the side bars and are accessible with one click! In my opinion, the usability and accessibility improved a lot this way.

The page, however, still has a few small flaws in the design. For example, whereas there is still a tiny logo in the home page, in this page, the logo is now nowhere to be found! Instead, the huge "mysaints" text at the top of the page, with the emphasis on the word "my," somehow gives off a strange vibe that the page is somehow intended to be my profile when it clearly isn't. It doesn't help either that all the headers of each little box in the sidebars containing the word "my" as well.

Since many of the people visiting the website may not be familiar with the school, the excessive use of the word "my," in my opinion, gives a connotation that these new visitors are not welcome!

Excessive Use of Javascript

In reality, non of the design issues discussed above are as significant since they do not necessarily affect the usability of the website. The main gripe I have with the site is its excessive use of Javascript.

First, let's see just how many requests this website makes:

Firstly, the website loads 114.5kb of javascript! (see bottom section of above image) That is a lot of javascript for a website that offers no interactivity beyond links and is simply displaying information! Also take note that some of the script is loaded from cdn.media34.whipplehill.net, a third-party server to which we have no control of. This is a dangerous move because if the other server (which I assume is the website of the web design company) goes down, OUR website would be dragged down too.

Not only loading the script itself takes time, but the script, after being loaded, loads even MORE information from the server (top section of the image) to display the sidebars. This load, which takes 663ms, causes the sidebars to show up approximately a second after you see the webpage. Another side effect is that users with javascript disabled (like search engines) would never see the sidebar!

If the only problem with javascript was loading time, then so be it, since internet connections are getting faster and faster nowadays. However, take a look at the "destination" of one of those links in the "Top News" section:

javascript:__pdL('204','New%20School%20Blog',%20'1',%20'nid=639858~ptid=138972~sdb=False~pf=pgt~mode=0~vcm=False',%20'',%20'False',%20'0',%20'',%20'default.aspx')

That's right; it's a complicated sequence of javascript for a hyperlink that simply takes you to another page! Not only are you now barred from opening the page in a new tab or window, but the website has now excluded search engines from visiting that link! Further more, when you copy the url of the destination page (after you click on the link to go to it, of course) and paste it in a new tab to go to it directly, the sidebars disappear!

I think these javascript mistakes are some serious technical flaws in the new website and although they are not initially visible to the user, they need to be addressed.

To conclude this post, I do agree that the new design is much more cleaner and usable than the old design. However, we truely need more knowledgeable people to evaluate the website so that the final product does not have many issues (one other area I did not talk about was the media section, which was improved slightly by adding a tiny icon of Youtube at the top right of the page, where nobody would see it).

The Golden Age of Web Technology?

In a thought-provoking piece on "golden ages" of urban creativity, Aaron Menn of Urbanophile pointed out that in some way, today is a golden age of many things:

... one could make an argument that today is a golden age of pretty much anything. We’re fortunate to live in a wealthy, mostly peaceful and free society, one that values inquiry, and in which we have tremendous technology and techniques available at our disposal far exceeding those people of the past ever dreamed. I dare say its true that we have more of pretty much everything, more people studying everything, amazing technical excellence in every field, and incredible scholarship about how almost everything really was in the past.

However, he also pointed out the distinction between this type of golden age and the other golden ages people often associate with:

... when we think about a golden age in the past, we think of the time in which those greatest of works were produced. We talk of the golden age of Athens, when those most primal works of western civilization were created.

Of course, the article was about creativity in urban planning. However, isn't this in some way even more applicable to web technology today? Nowadays, the internet is more ubiquitous than any time in the past 20 years. Everyone uses the internet. It's accessible, easy to use, and very powerful! At the same time, I would also argue that this is also the golden age of web technology, in the sense that innovation is constantly happening. Just a couple of years ago, Facebook and Twitter revolutionized the web. Now, smartphones and 3G internet are adding a whole new dimension to the internet. The possibilities seem endless now.

In this way, I see that it's perhaps the best time to learn and gain expertise in the field of web technology. In fact, it is the field where much of the innovation is still going on and everyone can perhaps participate in the next technological revolution. Even if you aren't pursuing a career in the field, don't you want to be actively part of something big that is happening right now?

Regarding Content Management Systems

Many websites use a content management system (CMS) such as Joomla! to facilitate easy publishing of news, media, and information. This tool has many advantages over the old way of directly editing the html files and uploading them.

Traditionally, at the turn of the millennium, people used HTML editors such as Front Page or Dreamweaver to edit and publish webpages. This is fine if the site is intended to be simple. However, as websites become more complex and dynamic, with information needing to be updated everyday and photos to be uploaded, manually editing HTML files become very cumbersome. Even worse, since every page has to have things like menu bars and headers, the html code of them gets copied multiple times and any update in the menu bar, for example, would need to be repeated over all pages.

As a result, server-side scripts like PHP and ASP begin to be used to generate pages on the fly so that things like toolbars and menu bars and banners can be edited easily and without the hassle of having to update all the (sometimes hundreds and thousands of) pages.

Even then, there is still a couple of problems. Firstly, trivial tasks like updating a website can actually be very difficult to people who aren't experienced with things like html and FTP, and those people often mess a website up by replacing the wrong file, or copy-pasting text from word, which always produce non-standard html that breaks easily, or a variety of other unexpected things. Also, creation of new pages become difficult as one have to mess with the delicate code used for generating the menu bar.

Content management system takes the dynamic pages to a whole new level by providing a whole administrative system out of the box that is robust and easy to use so that nobody has to touch any code. Websites that are built with a CMS, once created and set up, can be updated easily without much technical knowledge. Since they are very flexible, with a plethora of components like menus, sidebars, membership management, news boxes, themes, etc, most of the features that people expect can be added with a couple of clicks. Also, changes like adding a menu button or a new webpage becomes very trivial, with a couple of clicks instead of mingling with complex html code.

There are down sides to CMS systems though. For example, since the system is so powerful, under the hood it is very complex. As a result, once in a while, security holes pop up and the websites become vulnerable to hacks. The vendor of CMS systems will often release patches in time to patch the hole, however. Another problem is that on a slow server, CMS systems will be slow, since it has to process lots of information to display a single page.

Not every website is suitable for using a CMS either. Some websites are quite specialized. For example, a website providing email service would have to use another type of system. Sites like twitter and facebook also have their own custom system since they are also very special and different from most websites. News websites like NYTimes are also much more complicated since they have to deal with huge volume of visitors, while offering large amounts of information.

In general, the majority of websites simply present information, or are e-commerce websites, or are a community based website. These websites are the best suited for using a generic CMS system, and they should use them for the reasons discussed above. Any custom attempt to copy a CMS system is like reinventing the wheel since years of effort had already been put in to build one of the best CMS system: Joomla, and it is given free of charge! Building such a website with CMS would make everything so much easier that I don't see why so many are still stuck with static html pages and crappy custom systems that make it hard to update the website.

Genesis

The clueless people have now formed a coalition.

P.S. SG2010IT11, for those who want to know.