Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

A nice site, reasonably attractive and moderately engaging. For the educational industry, certainly one of the better looking sites. I'm sure teachers (many of whom are forced to use horrid auto-generators to build their classroom sites) will find it quite appealing.

Since most of my experience is in the business market, my critique is that it feels a bit two-dimensional. I'm looking for more interactivity. Not necessarily Flash or anything complex in programming, but I guess I just want to feel more 'engaged' by the site. I want to be drawn in more. Possibly adding some audio or video in the various sections would help. It needs a human touch somewhere, can I hear from a human being behind the organization, or maybe from some teachers who are using it? I guess I just want a face to the site. Right now, it's just a book. I want a human telling the stories.

From a design perspective, I find the left-orientation a bit annoying. For those with larger monitors, an elastic or liquid site design would help with overall appeal.

The search function, however, is quite handy and seems reasonably accurate. That's a great feature and I'm sure will see much use.

Good luck with it!

Juliett,

I just lost my long response I crafted.

Overall, I like the use of images and would reccomend not repeating images across the main pages.

To me the navigation is a little confusing as it is not consistent. Some pages have navigation on the left and other's do not. For example, the home page does not, but many other pages do. I think the navigation needs to be more obvious as the links appear very similar to other text on the page.

I do not like the links being repeated on the left and in and one the pictures. It is a little confusing as not all images have links. I woiuld leave the links off of the images.

There needs to be more explanation as to what a teacher can get out of this site.

The where to go page is the most confusing to me as it is not clear what do to there. I was expecting maybe various categories of places to see, more like the what to do page. Once I click the "Use our text search" it becomes more obvious, but it wasn't totally clear that it is a link as it is different than links on other pages.

I would take people to a page more like https://www.snh.org.uk/teachingspace/textsearch.asp at the Where to go link. The list is a little daunting and could be presented better in some form of categories. Maybe geographically, by topic, educational goal, etc. The search is great, but often times people do not know what they should be searching for and need ideas. This is where the categories will help.

The page feels a little stark. I too am not a big fan of left justified. As your site is fixed width,
I would center it and choose a background (outside the header) color. Right know the empty space being white and the content area being white is makes it feel empty. Adding a background color for the unused space will ground the page more.

I was expecting to see a map on each locatiojns page. This would help greatly with planning for teachers. Once at a location all navigation was gone and there was no way to choose anything else. Be sure there is navigation on every page.

I hope this helps,
Mike

I assume that most of your site visitor know why they are coming to the site. As a first time viewer of the site it was not completely clear - and I worry about that.

The layout of the site is interesting. I would like to see more use of parallel navagation tools.

Juliet,
I thought it was a good experience. Very thoughtful and seemed to me that it would be very beneficial for the teacher looking at opportunities for "field trips." I have no complaints - answered my questions - made me want to come and visit. Only question that comes to mind, and maybe your site allows it.

If I decide I want to take my class to XYZ, I see that I can get information prior to going, know what to take with us etc. Am I able to make the connection to the site (if there is a "recognized" or "established" point of beginning/location/office/headquarters to make the arrangements?

Nice and clean and very readable!

Merry Christmas!

CVN

Juliet,

I think heritage tourism is still growing. More and more US citizens are hyphenating (e.g. Irish-American) their heritage making it an easier sale.

I particularly like the layout. The squares are appealing to the eye. Lots of white space for teachers is good.

Probably should put "where to go" before "what to do". Just an opinion.

Michael

Some additional thoughts:

Tips for enhancing the site for SEO: https://website.grader.com/wsgid/2083514/default.aspx

Google analytics is currently turned off. Is this just temporary?

As for making the site easier to update: this is a perennial problem. You could make the site CMS-based (Wordpress, Joomla, etc.), and provide appropriate author-level access to the teachers to provide editing ability. Then you only have to touch the site to change non-content issues.

The home page for the site's search box isn't working (The page cannot be displayed: HTTP 500.100 - Internal Server Error - ASP error / Internet Information Services)

There's a fair bit of clicking necessary to drill down to just the page you're interested in. For example, in "What To Do", I need to then click on one of the eight categories, etc. Why not have a drop down menu when you hover over a main menu? Additionally, a site index map to allow me to see the wealth of material all at once.