Launch of new website design
Following consultation with staff and students, and nearly nine months of work we launched the new website design for the University of St Andrews during the early evening of Monday (8 September).
Unlike the website launch in May 2007, which combined for the first time all 27 of the support unit websites into one enterprise-wide site, this re-launch was more of a design update than a radical restructuring of information.
Feedback sessions
Back in February 2008 we meet over the course of three lunchtimes with both staff and students to elicit feedback on what people
- liked
- disliked
- thought was missing (both information and features)
Those sessions were very helpful, and feedback from those were thrown into a melting pot of ideas that had also been compiled from Helpdesk calls received since the launch of the new site in May 2007, as well as our own thoughts and observations from using the site for nearly a year (remember, we had access to it for a few before it went public).
Re-design goals
Our redesign goals were quite clear:
- Make the site easier to read
- Offer more variety/flexibility in terms of layout, e.g. 2, 3 and 4 column
- Ensure that it works in more browsers
- Add new functionality
On the whole we’ve managed to achieve this, and the feedback during the last month when the site was quietly released to staff and students within a closed preview has been very positive.
The techie bit
When designing and building a new site you have to decide from the start which technologies you will definitely support and which you will try to break as least as possible.
We’ve built the site around a grid-based CSS framework called Blueprint CSS, which offers us a number of advantages such as ensuring that the site is built using accepted Web standards, a well-designed and attractive typography. It also makes it painlessly simple to develop new site designs and layouts.
Much of the new functionality (such as the carousel of images on the homepage, and the tabs on the Current Staff and Students’ pages) is largely provided using the jQuery JavaScript library.
While writing new features using JavaScript can be a long and arduous process the jQuery library allows you to do it in a fraction of the time — some of the functionality added to the site took less than a minute to write! It also works with a lot of modern browsers (Firefox 1.5+, IE6+, Safari 2.0.2+, Opera 9+).
Browsers
Speaking of browsers, based on statistics gathered by our Google Analytics account as well as Yahoo!’s guidelines for Graded Browser Support we settled on ensuring that the latest browsers received the best experience possible. This included:
- Firefox 2.0
- Firefox 3.0
- Internet Explorer 6
- Internet Explorer 7
- Opera 9.x
- Safari 3.x
We tested the site back to Firefox 1.0, Internet Explorer 5.0, OPera 7.5 and Netscape Navigator 7.0, with varying degrees of success. On the whole though the site is still usable in these older browsers, even if it doesn’t look exactly as it does in a modern, standards-compliant browser.
One major issue that we have become aware of is that the site crashes when viewed in Safari 2.0.4 (419.3) on a Mac. The issue it would appear is to do with how Safari handles JavaScript. According to JavaScript expert, and jQuery author John Resig:
“Safari 2 has serious memory issues that are impossible to work around – simply loading and executing too much JavaScript will cause it to crash.” (J Resig, jQuery discussion group)
Our advice, following the graded browser support guideliness, would be to either disable JavaScript or upgrade to a more modern browser, such as Mozilla Firefox (the site works in everything back to Firefox 1.5).
Going live
Going live with a site is a strange experience of mixed emotions. There’s a combination of both elation that the site is going live, mixed with a little anti-climax and the nervousness of waiting for support calls to come in, hoping that we haven’t missed anything obvious.
On the whole, as a Web Team we’re really pleased with the results and the encouraging feedback that we’ve had from users, but we won’t stop there … there’s much still to be done, content to be improved on, sections to be reorganised and even more features to be added.