Topic
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Graduate School of Journalism
- Columbia University is the perfectly reasonable title for the main
page of a site about Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
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The topic of the counterpart at UMass' undergraduate Department of Journalism
is
To improve our site we could expand the topic. We could integrate course
web sites into the main web site, and also try to make available all documents
and projects of any interest produced by the Journalism Department staff and
students.
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Purpose
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To provide information on the School of Journalism. Entertainment
is a purpose of the site only insofar as some journalists sometimes
attempt to provide news entertainingly, because the site has links
to school-run or school-affiliated news outlets.
The information provided directly is not large but the information
provided through links is huge. A major purpose of the site,
then, is to direct people to places that provide content they need.
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Information would be the apparent purpose of the UMass Journalism
site: it provides brief biographical sketches of the faculty and
staff, a list of journalism courses with one paragraph descriptions,
an overview of major requirements, and a few web sites of journalism
courses. The tradition
page is just thrown in as an interesting anecdote, rather than being
subsumed in a history section, and as such can be considered to
be provided for entertainment as much as informational purposes.
Expanding the purpose of the site as a way to improve it has already been discussed
in the section on Topic.
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Source
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Private educational institution. |
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Government educational institution. |
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Target Audience
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Current students and potential
students, and people interested in the publications of the school and its students.
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Current students and potential
Journalism majors. |
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Content
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Other than the event calander,
the site is primarily links to other web sites that provide content of important
to the school. |
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Completely covered under Purpose.
We can make the site better by adding more. |
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Site Plan
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Part of the site plan is that most actual content is provided by other sites.
The Columbia journalism site is good in large part because of its simplicity.
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The main page is simply navigation to separate, unrelated pages they
might as well be their own sites which then, if they link to other (lower)
parts of the site (such as the faculty and staff section and the course web
sites section), act as empty navigational tools to unconnected pages in the
same way.
We have to integrate our site better.
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Navigation
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The site-wide navigation remains always in the same place, the frame that goes
down the left side of the screen. Thus, navigation does not even move
when a user scrolls.
They get away with this by never going more than a page deep, so to speak.
Eight of the nine internal links on the left menu go to single pages that essentially
do not contain internal links. Only the home, or main, page
has links on it that keep the leftmost navigation on screen. However,
they do not supplement it with other navigation so the user is forced to rely
on back or using the left menu to go home again.
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Go somewhere, and use your back
button on your browser (or the back links provided on the page) to get back to
the main page, which has the only navigation menu. The faculty
biography section of the site follows the same format: click on a person to
read about them, and the only way to get back to where you came from (and
so navigate to different people to read about them) is the back button on your
browser. |
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Links
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Loads and loads and loads of useful
links to all sorts of journalism sites, most of which are somehow affiliated with
the school. |
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Links to its own course web sites?
And two distinct links to the University proper? Doesnt even count.
Very poor. A clear way to improve the site is to make links to journalism
resources, at the very least.. |
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Page Design
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Pages do not adjust to fit different sized viewing areas. The result
is wasted white space on most screen sizes and resolutions. The resources
page is the exception.
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The considerable white space on the Journalism Departments main
page and the faculty bios is part of the design and should not be considered.
On comparing it to the Columbia site, however, one must note that our site offers
considerably less content and so can indulge in the luxury of white space.
Most pages expand and contract to fit the browser window admirably.
The tradition
page is black and white text with no styling that would associate it with the
rest of the site.
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The brief individual biographies (such as Steve
Simurdas) all have a yellow stripe down the left side of the page
(rather like the one behind this paragraph since it does use the same image).
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Creativity
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They have a logo for the school, but it is displayed too small for some of
its writing to be easily read. Still, it serves to unite the site and
provide a flag for the also-constant left index.
For all of its programs, prizes, publications, student work, and resources,
the site has a unique logo to go with the title of the site it is linking to.
(Almost all of these, incidentally, are relatively outside links the logos
mostly indicate that you are going to a new site with a different style, heres
a sample. Awsome!
The site uses graphics to good effect, but is never dependent on them.
Where crucial information is provided in graphics containing text, as in the
left index,
ALT text is supplied. Other than in this instance, graphics relatively
rarely contain text. Instead, the background colors and font face, case,
and spacing are adjusted to create distinctive headings for pages that look:
E X A C T L Y L I K E T H I S
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Using tables and text in this manner rather than graphics saves on download
time at the same time that it unifies the site and sets it apart from the rest
of the Web.
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The navigation on the main page to Faculty and Staff, Journalism/Spring
1998 Courses, Major Requirements, and Course Web Sites
changes to red, blue, purple, and green, respectively, with a JavaScript rollover.
Unfortunately, these colors are meaningless and, I guess, only there to look
pretty (in the brief instant before you click on them). It is good to
indicate in some way that you are hovering over a graphic that is a link, but
changing to a completely new color is not the best way to do this. One
common way is to make a sort of fiery effect appear around the text image.
Our use of pictures for the faculty is nice.
To improve our site we need first at least a logo to provide a common point
of focus, and preferably an attractive page design that can be used througout
the site.
We should (be creative and) steal the idea of using logos to mean going to
a site, or portion of our site, with different navigation, style, and design.
Perhaps it would be more effective if this intention were somehow made explicit.
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Functionality
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The site uses frames, which some people dont use. More important,
frames interfere with linking and bookmarking. For example, all the links
used in my page here link to the frames themselves rather than the page with
the frameset that they were in. Of less importance is the fact that all
pages have the same title when browsing (although they have taken the trouble
to title individual frames, as seen when they are opened in their own browser
window).
Frames are also dangerous because a site designer can easily cause pages to
open within frames when they really should not. Columbias
Grad. School of Journalism only made this mistake once that I found: go
to the resources page, look under professional organizations, and see what happens
when you click on the link called See also: CJR's web resource list.
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UMass Journalism sells itself short by declaring This site optimized
for Netscape 3 and a monitor resolution of 800x600 pixels or above when
in fact what limited material the site offers displays well in any browser at all. In effect, by
making an unnecessary and in fact meaningless narrow declaration about how the
site is best viewed, the site decreases its functionality.
Our Journalism site would be served best by continuing to avoid frames, removing
the unnecessary caveat, eliminating our dependence on graphics for the very
first navigation, and attempting to operate with one site that works well with
or without graphics, particularly since were there, or nearly there, already.
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Unique Features
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Something of a unique feature is
the impressive assortment of programs
related to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism available through
the web site. |
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To improve a site in ways that
really set it apart from others, adding unique features are among the best strategies.
One possible feature would be a section asks visitors to post what they think
ought to be investigated or reported on. Students of journalism (whether
involved in a particular class or even the department or not) could then write
articles based on these ideas. Interested people could track the progress
of stories (someone decides to write on a topic, further development of ideas,
even drafts for public editing), and this portion of the site would also of course
host (or provide a hypertext link to) the completed article resultant from the
original posted idea. |
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