CUinfo Redesign: More Comps
First things first.
We really liked the idea that Silvia had about including weather on CUinfo. Check it out.
(Same deal as before: click on the image to open it large in a new window.)
Second things second.
I am really intrigued by the comments asserting that CUinfo is an internal web page.
It’s certainly true that cornell.edu and CUinfo have potentially different audiences, but, in my mind that’s not the same thing as an “internal” page versus an “external” page.
This summer, Diane took a trip to MIT to learn about how their web team built their News site. One of the things she discovered is that everything that we see when we go to any site with mit.edu in it is a truly external page with carefully crafted (and controlled) content. All of the proverbial meat of their site–the things that their staff and faculty and students use every day to navigate their way through life at MIT is behind a wall that the rest of the world can’t see. That, folks, is internal.
CUinfo has never been internal. In fact, for a very long time, when you typed in “www.cornell.edu”, what you got was CUinfo. It’s really only within the past five years or so that Cornell has developed “internal” and “external” home pages. (Trust me, I lived through that particular debacle with a view from the hot seat.)
I know what you’re thinking. Semantics. The girl is splitting hairs.
And maybe I am. But here’s the thing.
Unless we lock CUinfo down behind kerberos, it’s not an internal page. In addition, moving it under the cornell.edu umbrella–and by that, I don’t mean look and feel, I mean the ultimate goal of combining the two sites seamlessly–elevates its visibility to a level that includes an external audience. “Homey” is nice. But don’t you prefer a chance to straighten up before guests come?
I’m also intrigued by the sheer number of comments that have used the term “glossy and corporate”. Am I to infer that this means that cornell.edu is also glossy and corporate? Seriously. I curious about this one. Share your thoughts?
Why do you want to homogenize Cornell’s webspace? The arguments of loading speed and compactness of the existing CUInfo page have already been stated. Above all that, the existing page is not only more practical, but by its very uniqueness is more aesthetically pleasing than the Borgish You-Will-Be-Assimilated version you’re proposing. I have nothing against your design itself, of course, and I’m always glad to see CIT working for betterment, it’s just that it doesn’t seem as much an _improvement_ of look and functionality as a settling for the status quo.
And as for internal vs. external… regardless of which words you use, the argument still stands that the page is directed more to people already within the cornell community than to outsiders, to whom we apparently need to pander using “professional” looking web designs for the sake of attracting applicants. Do you have any statistics as to the on campus vs. off campus usage rates of cuinfo.cornell.edu as compared to the main website?
Of course, I’m sure if the community is sufficiently divided on whether they like the new design, it wouldn’t hurt too much to maintain the old page alongside the new?
The new design makes categories easier to find but it is so-o-o boring looking, sorry. Can you spice up the graphics and layout; how about some variety in font, and maybe colors, pictures, illustrations like the current page ?
I’d like to point out the following from http://www.cornell.edu/about/site/index.cfm
Timeline of cornell.edu
1994
Cornell establishes a presence on the World Wide Web. At this time, the “Cornell Home Page” most closely resembles what we now think of as CUInfo and was owned and maintained by Cornell Information Technologies (CIT).
1996
University Relations determines that there is a need for a home page that is geared toward an external audience; namely parents, prospective students, and alumni. Another site is established for this purpose. http://www.info.cornell.edu is owned and maintained by Campus Information and Visitor Relations on a desktop Macintosh server in Day Hall. A redirect is established from http://www.cornell.edu that sends users to the “internal” or “external” home page based on their IP address and whether they are coming to the site from on or off campus. Internal users are pointed to CUInfo, while those from the outside are sent to what is referred to as “The Cornell Welcome Page”. The external site saw 1,079,298 hits during the course of the year. By comparison, the current iteration of cornell.edu averages over thirty million hits per month.
I don’t see any image or link to view the new design in the blog??! anyone have any ideas why? (I’m using a workstation PC with IE 6).
thanks.
Now I can see the image sporadically on the blog…
- Seems like the banners take up too much space. Perhaps keep just the red Cornell banner & get rid of the gray Admissions, Academics, etc. along with the new CUinfo banner? Although it’s kind of dated, I kind of like the old CUInfo logo. Maybe that could be incorporated into the red banner rather than having a whole separate CUInfo banner?
- I think the most used links could be highlighted better to draw your eye visually to them when the page first loads. I think the sidebar was an effective way of doing this. Perhaps on the right side though?
- The headers have a lot of excess space above & below. I’m all for compacting the site so you see as much as possible without scrolling.
- Could the headers actually be links too? i.e. News & Events have their own separate links & could just be eliminated if the header words were links instead (maybe without the underline?). Same thing for having a header & a separate weather page link (btw, I don’t think the ‘last updated’ info for the weather is necessary for this page– people can go to the weather page if they want detailed info).
- In order to compact the bulletted lists, perhaps the first column could be left justified & the second column could be right justified. Maybe that would keep the benefits of the bulletted list, but also keep some of the compactness of the old CUInfo design.
- It seems like the bullets could be more like roll over buttons that pop when you roll over the link. The bullets right now are almost negligible because they fade into the background so much.
- Seems like most lists are alphabetic, but not completely. Perhaps it would be more sensible to just keep each list alphabetic, including most visited?
- Kind of a small thing, but if it is alphabetic, I think just simply ‘Uncle Ezra’ is better than ‘Dear Uncle Ezra’.
- finally, I’d like to see the Cornell Chronicle, the Daily Sun, and PawPrints each have a bullet under News & Events (maybe include the Daily Sun under the most used links too).
“It’s really only within the past five years or so that Cornell has developed ‘internal’ and ‘external’ home pages.”
exactly. that’s what these pages are now. what it was 10 years ago has nothing to do with this discussion. http://www.cornell.edu no longer points to what we now know as cuinfo.
” ‘Homey’ is nice. But don’t you prefer a chance to straighten up before guests come?”
the current cuinfo page is nothing to be ashamed of. think Google. keep it simple and efficient, with as little scrolling as possible.
I would like to see the “libraries” link under the student life and academics section rather than grouped with dining and police in the campus information section.
Agreed, Kathleen. Library needs to be under academics.
Like the layout — clean and simple=usable.
The reason I liked CUInfo in the first place was that it was so informal, so much less like an admission brochure and much more of a populist portal. I’m sure you can incorporate some of those elements in the new website to make that clear.
Yes, cornell.edu is glossy and corporate. I think that’s appropriate.
Oh no – the new cuinfo will be toooooo boring. I don’t like that at all. Please leave it the way it is. It’s cute – especially how you change the banner every season or so – and I already know where everything is on the page. If you change it, then I will be so upset. I like how most of the rest of the entire web site is very classy and uniform, but cuinfo is for the STUDENTS and we like it the way it is. It’s easy to navigate and its content is simple and concise. Cuinfo is my homepage, and if it gets changed, I will be highly upset.
One note: if you are homogenizing all of cornell.edu, can you PLEASE change cals.cornell.edu? It is horrendously ugly and I hate looking at it.
Thanks.
One more thing – I am not a fan of white space. If you are going to upset me and change all of cuinfo, at least get rid of that white space on the bottom right-hand corner. It looks dumb.
If you must change cuinfo, just change the colors of the background and the links and stuff, that’s fine. I just like the layout of the current cuinfo page. Change the colors if you want, but don’t touch the positions and styles of the links & categories.
I like this new version. It is much more presentable to outsiders. While the overall content of the page is meant to serve the Cornell community, the truth is that people also use this page to learn more about Cornell. I know that I looked at it when I was choosing between schools. (Though I still chose Cornell, despite CUinfo’s appearance) I think the new design greatly improves the image we should present. The old page, while functional, looks outdated and not very user-friendly.
I almost never use cuinfo, mostly because there are just too many links in one spot, same goes for uportal. My brain shuts down and I run away. I go to cuinfo to get to the university calendar/final exam schedule etc pages, and thats about it.
This is why I like the ‘frequently used section’, thats probably all that I will use. Also, in the current CUInfo, certain links are bolded, and you should do that on the new one, and also group these bolded links in the ‘beginning’ of each section.
You could even have some kind of click-through script that kept track of how many times each link on the page is accessed and dynamically re-order the links and/or categories to put the most used links toward the top of the category and page.
taking that further, you could could populate the ‘frequently used’ section dynamically with usage data stored in cookies per user.
In any case, I think it’s going to be a lot better, asthetically it looks better than the current one, which reminds me of 1998, and the new page already has a better layout, which I think can be improved even more.
sorry I love brainstorming.
1) I don’t think the negative connotations of “glossy and corporate” apply – I think it looks clean and simple. I’m a big fan of the fonts and colors used.
2) can you add the Electronic Directory as a Most Used Link? The only times I come to CUInfo is to look somebody’s info up.
3) Will the banner image change every couple seconds or every refresh?
I really hope you are not going to make me scroll. What I love about the current CUINFO is that I don’t have to scroll; I can see everything I need as soon as the page loads (yes, one of the reasons I use Google exclusively). And for crying out loud, don’t assume that “thin” pages are a wonderful thing. Sure “white space” borders on the edges are nice, but the 5-inch borders that show up on my screen, excuse the language, suck. If you must have edge borders, please make them adjustable to the monitor of the viewer.
Looks pretty cool
The new design makes categories easier to find but it is so-o-o boring looking, sorry.
the new design needs some work. organizing the topics and subtopics as was done in the original CUinfo would save a lot of space.