Category Archives: Web design

| Web design

Concordia’s new website fails to improve

Concordia University is changing the design of its homepage. Again. The new website, currently in beta testing, has some laudable goals: create a uniform look across the dozens of departmental websites, and introduce new features.

So far, the new website falls flat. Here’s why:

  1. The website pushes news, which was the big selling point of their current design, down the page and into a corner in favour of static content.
  2. The immensely-useful “quicklinks”, to things people actually want to reach like the student information portal, program calendar, class schedule etc. are moved to the bottom of the page or taken off the homepage entirely.
  3. The tour touts the page’s accessibility features, including the ability to increase text size (which is already available in most browsers, but they also change the stylesheet to fit too). Unfortunately, the style sheet breaks at larger font sizes and the page looks ugly.
  4. Giant header image pushes all content down.

It looks more “Web 2.0” in all the bad ways. And since it fails at the most basic test: whether it’s better than the site it’s replacing, I’ll give it a C- (assuming that their content-management system actually makes it easier for departments to make websites, which has not yet been proven).

| Business, Media, On the Net, Web design

Google the wires

Speaking of wire services, Google News, which used to be an aggregator of news content with links to full articles on their original sites (and for some reason annoyed content owners who I guess don’t want traffic from the biggest website on Earth), has come to an agreement with Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Canadian Press and the U.K. Press Association to host wire stories on its site (as evidenced by that CP story hosted on Google).

The result of this is that when you see mention of “Canadian Press” or “Associated Press” in Google News results, that link will take you on a page at Google instead of some cheap generic small-market U.S. network TV affiliate who just republish unaltered wire copy online.

What it doesn’t mean is that you will be able to directly scroll the wires on Google. You still have to go through the Google News homepage. Fortunately there are other places that give you almost-direct access to unedited CP wire copy.

It probably won’t mean a huge deal, but you’ll note that wire copy on Google is much simpler and less ad-riddled than the places you’ll usually find it, which I think will lead to more people linking to stories off Google when given the choice.

| Blogosphere, Media, Web design

TQS needs to learn web programming

I just tried to subscribe to the one blog on TQS’s website, that of Jean-Michel Vanasse. Unfortunately, I can’t, because the RSS feed for his blog is malformed.

It looks like the problem is with their advertising system. They’re adding ads as items within the feed (bound to annoy some people, but something we could live with). Unfortunately, they’re not escaping the ampersands (&), which is causing problems for any feed reader expecting valid XML.

Odd that they would not have noticed this. Anyone want to take bets on how long it’ll take them to fix it?

UPDATE: If you guessed “four days”, give yourself a cookie.

| Media, Web design

So. Many. Ads.

I just went to a page on the Kingston Whig-Standard’s website:

Ads run amok

My God.

Un case you can’t tell, the article starts at the very bottom of the page. And there’s so much advertising on it that they can’t even fit the entire headline on the first screen.

When are mainstream media web properties going to learn how to properly place their ads online? Would you read a newspaper whose front page was almost exclusively advertising? Why are we expecting different for websites?

| Business, Media, Web design

More bad web programming

CanWest has launched a new classified website, househunting.ca, for real estate listings. It’s still in beta, which is good because it still has problems with the way it’s coded:

Househunting.ca error message

Guess this Canadian website’s code wasn’t written in-house.

There are larger problems. The search results (there aren’t enough listings to analyze whether their search is good or not) produce a MapQuest map that’s centred on some random location that’s not where you searched for. When you move the map so you can see where you actually searched, the page forces itself to reload and change the search results to wherever you have the map pointed to.

The search box also doesn’t provide fine-tuned price ranging (or, for that matter, any search beyond location, price and size). If your range isn’t in their pre-set list, you’re out of luck (or you have to search a few times).

CanWest isn’t alone in these badly-designed online classified sites. All the websites owned by big media companies have downright awful designs. When a simple site like Craigslist is so successful, you wonder why people are trying to make these overly-complicated sites work instead of stealing a good idea.

| Montreal, Slow News Day, Web design

Blog about Tremblay! He’s so rad!

Not news: Municipal party encourages supporters to write letters to newspapers, call in to talk radio and campaign for them.

News: Municipal party encourages supporters to write letters to newspapers, call in talk radio and write blog posts to campaign for them.

Yes folks, mayor Gérald Tremblay and his ilk are using the power of their crappy website to harness the power of ordinary Montrealers with absolutely nothing to do. They’re encouraging people to blog about them to tell everyone how rad they are. Like that Robert-Bourassa Avenue idea. How great was that?

I might have more respect for the move if the website wasn’t so badly designed. Of the major issues I outlined two and a half months ago when the website launched, they’ve only fixed about half of them. The easier half. And the fact that the website is ungooglable is a funny afterthought by comparison.

Since nobody’s taken the bait yet, let me be the first blogger to talk about Mayor Tremblay and his brilliant administration that’s in touch with the people. And add a </sarcasm> tag after it.

UPDATE: Tristan Péloquin tries to evoke the cyber army.

| In the news, Media, On the Net, Web design

MédiaMatinQuébec.com

Just learned that MédiaMatinQuébec, the free paper being run by locked-out workers at the Journal de Québec, has launched its website at MediaMatinQuebec.com.

And it’s already more impressive than any other Quebec media website. It’s fast, lean and easy-to-navigate.

You know, the more this conflict goes on, the more I think these workers should forget about the Journal and turn MédiaMatin into a business. Sell some more ads, rent a small office building and this could really be something.

| Montreal, Web design

Good ol’ pageid 4397,6375618

The City of Montreal has unveiled a unified portal for its libraries, and just look at its easy-to-remember URL:

http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/portal/page?_pageid=4397,6375618&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Really, 4397,6375618? I would have thought 4397,5431618.”

But the city’s web design people, they have their quirky labels. And pageids, and dads and schemas (all of which are required values).