Quite funky and I like it...

UPDATE--

meeting again on Thursday.

Those not in Sys Eng, staff or not subscribed to Parts 1-4 mailing lists, don't fret! If your interested in leaving feedback please fill in this questionnaire:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=hABGBMBOeb5GipP8skcyAA_3d_3d

 Thanks

 

From:	https://www.mail.reading.ac.uk/session/siu05paf//AAAF@abook_take?alias=&name=Kate%20Dow&email=webmaster%40reading.ac.uk
To:	https://www.mail.reading.ac.uk/session/siu05paf//AAAF@abook_take?alias=&email=siu05paf@reading.ac.uk
Cc:	https://www.mail.reading.ac.uk/session/siu05paf//AAAF@abook_take?alias=&name=Andrew%20John%20Owen&email=a.j.owen%40reading.ac.uk , https://www.mail.reading.ac.uk/session/siu05paf//AAAF@abook_take?alias=&name=Richard%20Sandford&email=r.j.sandford%40reading.ac.uk
Date:	Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:07:07 +0100
Subject:	RE: University of Reading's Website

Dear Phil,

Firstly many thanks for taking the time to email us. My apologies for not replying immediately, these are obviously important issues and I wanted to be sure of giving you the most complete answer possible. The websites and resources that you refer to are actually looked after by several different departments – my department, Digital Development, looks after the “external”

facing website which is aimed at prospective students, media, the community and many other audiences. The areas for current students are looked after by Student Services, the RISIS team, the Blackboard team, and within Schools and Departments, so I thought it best to forward your email to the relevant parties who will be able to answer the questions for their area.

To give you some background information, the University websites have been through a rebranding and migration project which started over 2 years ago.

The main aims of this project was to give a more uniform look and feel across our websites, migrate the websites into a new Content Management System, restructure the website and review and update the content. As you will be able to appreciate with an institution of this size this project was a large undertaking and involved meetings and consultations with the University Web Information Steering Group, Heads of School and ITS. A combination of workshops, interviews and an online surveys was used to gather feedback and recommendations from a cross section of our audiences, these included prospective and current students, University employees, academics and alumni.

We have received a lot of positive feedback about the sites since the migration project but also accept that it is by no means perfect (and was never expected to be so in this first phase of redevelopment).  The websites are and always should be evolving to take into account changes in technology, audiences and information.  One of the changes we will be making shortly (which your email backs up) will be looking into ways of signposting the Staff and Student websites more clearly from the home page.

I hope this goes someway towards answering some of your questions, you should receive replies from the other departments shortly. I will be out of the office from the 1st April – 20th April but would welcome the opportunity to talk further once I’m back - perhaps you would consider assisting us with setting up some further userability testing?

Best wishes,

Kate Dow

Acting Head of Digital Development

Ok so after a bit more digging and still no reply (i know its only been a few days but i'm keen to read what they have to say) I followed the link in the response email to a 'contact us' page. http://www.reading.ac.uk/about/about-contacts.asp

I then googled the phone number above the webmaster@rdg.ac.uk link to take me to this page...

http://www.reading.ac.uk/deao/contact/deao-contact.asp

it appears that 'digital development' is actually an internal group to the uni and states this on their about page

'The Development team manages a range of fundraising campaigns for the University, seeking external funding from alumni, friends, trusts & foundations and corporate sponsors. The team works closely with Faculties and Schools to add value to the already excellent reputation the University has for its student support & facilities, teaching and research.'

uh huh, i feel my self saying. So they intend to add value to an excellent reputation... how exactly? By displaying an appauling website? I fear that this awesome website that we have been graced with is a great example of why IT managers should stay doing what they do best, and that is managing. and not coding. To be fair to them the site mostly passes html validation (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.reading.ac.uk&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0) but that may well be because it doesn't actually do anything useful.

I also love the fact that you can't actually find their page from the home page.

The phone number given on the contact us page, the number I googled, links to a Kate Dow, and so I shall address my next email to Kate and her superior Raj and see what the outcome of that is, as well as enquiring why there has not been a reply to my original query.

Digital Development

Name	Position	Telephone	Email
Raj Chadha	Head of Digital Development	+44 (0) 118 378 7109	r.chadha@reading.ac.uk
Kate Dow	Digital Projects Manager	+44 (0) 118 378 6764	k.l.dow@reading.ac.uk

Check out the photos if you're still not totally convinced

http://picasaweb.google.com/philip.flynn

 For those who share my pain and hatred for the uni web site, i shall update this entry with any response i get, which hopefully will be valid answers to my valid comments, even if they were written with a hint of sarcasm and humour.

From: https://www.mail.reading.ac.uk/session/siu05paf//AAAR@abook_take?alias=&email=siu05paf@reading.ac.uk To: https://www.mail.reading.ac.uk/session/siu05paf//AAAR@abook_take?alias=&email=webmaster@reading.ac.uk Date: 26 Mar 2009 22:53:49 +0000 Subject: University of Reading's Website

To whom it may concern,

My name is Phil Flynn, I'm a finalist on the computer science degree
scheme. It has been an issue of mine since joining the university that the
reading website is practically unusable for anyone other than prospective
students. I assumed it was just me, however after the last student-staff
liaison meeting, I discovered that it was also a hate of both staff and
students in all other years. Please take the following comments with an air
of humour however please see the frustration from our side.

The problem seems to be that during the website design, there either wasn't
any or if there was any user acceptance and usability testing it was of the
wrong nature. The site seems to be tailored to drawing in students however
for those who are here and require any kind of university related
information, the site provides obscurity to the point at which Google is
your only chance, which it shouldn't be.

For example, timetabling, term start and end dates and other information
such as the medical practise is practically impossible to locate unless a
search is made from Google, that is of course unless the user really likes
digging through pages. There are no functional links (or if there are, no
one has ever found them) to provide this information. It is easier, faster
and more reliable to simply search for it than navigate the uni website. If
this was the intention during development it is an extremely poor method of
design. If there is a reason for this obscurity, I can't think of one but
still, then providing the information and simply not linking to it is a
truly appalling method of hiding information.

Starting at http://www.reading.ac.uk/ how many mouse clicks does it take to find
the term dates of an undergraduate studying computer science. Go on try it
now.

Take for example Sheffield universities website (http://www.shef.ac.uk/). It
is bright, uncluttered, updated daily and a pleasure to navigate and as a
real bonus the search function works reasonably well. The Reading website
is cluttered, unclear and unusable. It cannot be doing anything (positive)
for the image of the university. If the reason for the poor construction is
lack of funding, which I find hard to believe for such a critical public
facing form of media, why not provide it as a final year project or even as
coursework for the 2nd year GUI/HCI module which Prof. Rachel McCrindle
teaches. This module involves the creation a complete website that complies
to w3c standards and involves usability testing and consideration. The
results are surprising and at the very least would show other takes on the
presentation and format the site may take.

Looking at the previous versions of the reading website
(http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.reading.ac.uk) it seems that
between the years of 2001 and 2002, the website on first impressions
actually appears usable, or at least readable. Before 2001, its just plain
dated, and after which everything goes to pot. None more so than the
dramatic change in 2007 and afterwards.

Another VERY annoying aspect of the reading domain is the incorrect
forwarding of addresses without the "www.". In that there is none. Is there
a purpose for this other than to force people to use FQDN's? As a potential
student it doesn't look particularly good when every other institution can
manage it except us.

In conclusion, for the next website design please please PLEASE perform at
least SOME user testing; perhaps even using students... the actual users of
the system. Websites should be easy to read and use, especially when the
goal is to attract students who are going to pay £X thousand a year to
study and support the university.

As a side note, can the examinations office please release the exam results
in a productive manner? There are at least two correct methods to this
problem and one fundamentally flawed method. The method that is currently
being employed is delivery via risis. This approach should work except the
entire university is alerted to the fact that the results are up and there
is no surprise that the site falls over within 5 seconds (although it
probably provides a few giggles for those in support watching the traffic
graphs peak). What is wrong with either emailing the results to students,
or hiring some cloud computing for the day? Yes the latter involves
spending money, but seriously, is $50 REALLY going to sorely missed for a
few hours of usable service? (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/) Failing those two
options, restrict risis to bands of users, alphabetical or module groups or
whatever is best suited during results. Could risis be hosted on a better
server or traffic load balanced efficiently? It behaves like a Pentium 2,
when it decides to actually serve pages.

Finally, for sites that require certificates please consider either getting
certificates for the .rdg.ac.uk domain also or simply forward to
.reading.ac.uk. The short cut is incredibly handy but hampered severely by
poor maintenance and housekeeping.

I accept that a lot of the problems might be due to 'higher powers that
be', however if the site isn't usable what's the point in it being there. I
look forward to hearing your comments and views. Yours sincerely

Phil Flynn

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn12861-cellphones-team-up-to-become-smart-cctv-swarm.html

http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/publ/papers/bolligph-facet2007.pdf

 Tonight we will be doing structures, for loops, classes and simple drawing of shapes on a canvas (form).

General overview:

You will click randomly on your form, your click positions will be recorded and when you select go, your points will be sorted by X and Y positions and then printed out on the form.

Each point will be a structure containing two integers... X and Y.

This should be a simple way to show you how useful structures can be and how to use them properly. (The intention is that you have the option of using them in your convex hull coursework. And i strongly suggest it!).

So overview, things you will be using tonight are:

lists, structures, foreach and for loops, classes, simple drawing procedures, mouse status monitoring.

As usual, I will see you all in G45 tonight at 6ish or G40 if there is no room.

 See you all later!