UMass Journalism Department Web Site

Benjamin Melançon

Review and Comparison with Columbia University

Topic

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.

Purpose

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.

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.

Source

Target Audience

Content

Site Plan

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.

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.

Navigation

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.

Links

Page Design

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.

The considerable white space on the Journalism Department’s 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.

The brief individual biographies (such as Steve Simurda’s) 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).

Creativity

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, “here’s 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

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.

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.

Functionality

The site uses frames, which some people don’t 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.  Columbia’s 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.”

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 we’re there, or nearly there, already.

Unique Features