Website Content and Markup - New University of Botswana website

In the previous review of the new University of Botswana website, I talked about mainly aesthetic features of the website like layout, navigation, typography etc.

This is the second and last part of that review and will be focusing on Content and Markup as promised. I wanted to contact the webmaster for the UB website, unfortunately I only found email addresses for the Public Relations officer and other Administrative junkies whom I doubt would know anything about CSS or XHTML.

I mean, what website of that magnitude does not have a simple contact details page for the webmaster or admin, an advanced one wouldn’t hurt either. Let alone, lack of a contact form anywhere on the site, I mean c’mon even my 10page website has a contact form. Anyway, enough with the ranting, let me get back to the task at hand; review of the content and markup.

Content

I am not going to bore you with all the hullabaloo about how Content is King and everything else a slave rant, I already talked about that in my first review of the ministry of trade and industry website. However,

1. There is immense content in the UB website but some of it is mis-classified, for instance, when you click on the left menu under Information for … -> Staff , you land on a page about Employment Opportunities at UB which is a bit awkward unless of course the job opportunities are open only to UB Staff members.
2. The navigation menu titled Media and Business leads to a list of tenders at UB except that there is a separate Tenders link; how misleading is that?
3. Most of the content in the website is too narrative rather than informative, for instance, when clicking on the Faculties and Departments menu, you get some a narrative about student enrollment and the names of faculties.The disappointing thing is that such narrative has no links whatsoever to the faculties’ websites or at least the different programmes offered in those faculties.
4. When you navigate to the the Department of Computer Science and guess what you get, information about the number of staff, the department’s vision and mission, annual intake and lots of other information but nothing about :
   • What programs are offered in the department
   • Research Activities
   • how to apply to academic programs in the department
   • How about Alumni including semi-alumni like myself ?
5. A very commendable feature which also is its detriment is the minimalist approach adopted in the design; no flashy images dancing on the screen. This makes the site load reasonably quicker and clean and less amateurish.

Markup

XHTML and CSS compliance is not mandatory but any serious web designer will make an effort to ensure that their web site validates using the W3C XHTML and CSS Validators. If you are a webmaster and you want a sermon on why you should validate you site, get it from the horse’s mouth at W3C.

1. The ub.bw homepage itself contains 30 validation errors some of which are basic errors like having a height on an input form field or enclosing an orphaned paragraph tag inside an anchor tag like :

   <input name="search" type="image" src="images/go.gif" align="top" width="20"
   height="21" border="0">

2. <a href="news.cfm?pid=221&t=662"><P>A University of Botswana Senior Lecturer
    in the Department . . .  countries from six continents across the world.</a>

   

3. However, the CSS does validate somewhat if you can call a single validation error success and I guess by the standards we have observed so far, it’s safe to say it validates in that regard except of course for specifying a padding value without units i.e
   #copyright {
width: 210px;
float:left;
padding:20 0 0 0px;
margin: 20px 0px 0px 0px;
text-align:left;
font-weight:bold;
color:#000;
}


The highlighted line should instead read padding : 20px 0 0 0; instead of the other way round.
The CSS varies from page to page even for the static content blocks so the validation in one page does not necessarily translate to validation in another; the same holds for XHTML validation.

Verdict and Recommendations

The minimalist approach is very good, had the implementation been good, the website would have been a killer. All is not lost however, if only they could :

1. Make use of a liquid layout that resizes with respect to the size of the user’s display. The fixed 800×600 display makes the site break horribly when increasing the texts in some pages.
2. Do away with the collapsible feature of the left navigation menu, it is a nice feature but it makes navigating through the website tedious and at times annoying.
3. Fix the top navigation menu, add margins or paddings between the menu items and increase their size; as they are they are too small and that makes them seem like an auxiliary feature of the website despite that they should be a prominent feature.
4. Improve the search script, at the moment it returns results that are not very intuitive; try searching for ‘computer science courses’ and you get puzzling results, try ’student representantive’ and you get nothing at all. If that’s too difficult to do, Google custom search might be handy.
5. The quick-links at the top menu
   

   …i counted like 15 links under the “quick links” drop-down menu, how quick can that be…
   [icemadila in New UB logo is rubbish]

6. And please, use intuitive anchor text to link to the relevant content, no need to have a link saying Cows and linking to content that talks about Sheep [with all due respect]
7. Use search engine friendly URLs rather than things like http://www.ub.bw/about.cfm?pid=449&m=158
8. Use images to make the website lively, content is good of course but text is not the only type of content, a picture is worth many many words.

All in all, well done to those who had the ambition to embark on the re-branding exercise to try and bring the UB to the 21st century Information Age but as with any website, there is no perfect web site design; only “perfect critique . . . ( lol ) and the new UB website is far from perfect.

Thanks to ndanji, babylicious and Thuso for their comments on the previous posts, much appreciated so why not leave your comment below, regular commentators are rewarded with a dofollow link to their website.