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).