New athletics Web site a welcome relief

February 25, 2008 —

A BIG UPGRADE -

The redesigned athletics Web site looks and feels great, and there seems to be a lot more content too, including highlight reels of the incoming rookies on the football team. It looks like one of SVSU's departments is committed to really retooling its Web site to make it more reader-friendly.

Hopefully, other departments will pick up the pace and continue to make more information available.

What follows is basically a list of suggestions for the various academic and administrative departments to consider. Being a newspaper, we spend countless hours navigating sites looking for information, including SVSU's site and the sites of many of its competing institutions.

Suggestion No. 1: Keep it simple.

No fancy fonts, no random pictures, and no menus buried more than a couple clicks deep.

The gray, non-standard Optima font on several departmental pages shows up different on different machines, for example, and while gray might look sexy, it's annoying to read on white backgrounds.

And what about the tiny picture in the top right of the main page ... what is that of? Currently, it's a picture of a woman and a podium. There's no explanation of what she's doing, and there's just no reason for it to be there.

And the quick links are nice, but why not just link to those pages directly? Seattle University (www.seattleu.edu) has a similar set of links in text at the top of the page. Finally, the font sizes need to increase. At one point in time, small fonts were all the rage. That time is over, clearing the way for an era in which viewers can read text without squinting through bifocals.

Suggestion No. 2: Balance attractiveness with usefulness.

Out of thousands of the university Web sites we've visited, SVSU's is easily one of the most attractive. It's clean, has lots of pictures, and is generally uncluttered. But it's also not the easiest site to extract information from. Much uglier sites, like the athletics page at GVSU's site, are much easier to navigate, with big, bold text and links not hidden behind drop-down menus. SVSU should try to strike a balance between the two. It's worth noting that SVSU's athletics page is doing this quite well.

Suggestion No. 3: Fix the search engine.

At some times, we love the search engine, because it returns every single possible result you could imagine. But at other times, we hate it. An example would be useful here, and we were going to use "parking permit" to see where the engine would take us. But we just got this message: "An error has occurred within the search engine... Please try again in a few moments." E-mail us if you want the screen capture.

What we've noticed is while the engine returns a lot of results, they're sorted poorly. A far cry from a Google search, you'll often get some obscure Word document from some departmental page as the top hit after searching for something. The new "Featured result" tool is a step in the right direction, though.These are just suggestions. SVSU's Web staff and its various departments do a good job of keeping everything up to date, and SVSU's athletics department is really headed in the right direction.