Six Things I Hate About My Web Site
Ask Olli is definitely a work in progress. Having just made a few big changes, it seems like a good time to look at what still needs work.
1. The Calendar’s Handling of Time Zones
The way the calendar handles time zones is quite awkward. It doesn’t account for daylight savings time. Also the calendar can’t handle situations where an event that happen on one day in one time zones needs to show up on another day in a different time zone.
I’d like visitors to be able to chose their time zone and view online courses and events in their time and take care of all the date and time calculations in the calendar. Luckily, there’s nothing on the calendar to see so it’s not a high priority.
2. Member Sign In
The sign in box takes up a lot of space.
3. Member Registration
There’s no good reason to register. No real benefit. One of the developers I was working with convinced me that I needed to have it, but I’m not buying any more.
I’m thinking of removing member registration altogether. I could keep it to remember time zone settings from visit to visit, but I can also do that with a cookie easily enough and I’d free up a lot of screen space.
4. The Search Page
When you click on the Search tab, it takes you to a page about searching. Except for the blog pages, there is a search bar on the left of every page with some neat Javascript hiding all the possible search parameters. People who miss the search bar are going to expect a big search box in the middle of the page when they click a link clearly marked Search and people with Javascript turned off aren’t going to be able to access the search parameters.
I’m going to change the search page to a static page with all of the parameters grouped underneath.
5. Browse
Once I add a few more organisations to the database, it will be pretty pointless. I think most people are going to be more interested in finding resources and courses and then look at the organisation that provides them if they are interested in the organisation at all.
I’ll probably leave it in, but it’s going to be moved to an area of less prominence.
6. I Don’t Have Enough Content Indexed
Easily the biggest problem. As I write this, there are 1594 records and I have a few hundred more on spreadsheets awaiting completion before adding them. Until now, all of the record have been added by hand so that Flash and Java-based games, and podcasts all get equal weight. But the process is excruciatingly boring.
I’d like to at least partially automate the process. I’ll be looking in to web crawlers, podcast search, linking databases, and RSS feeds. There are a few big challenges though:
- Indexing the search parameters like Level and Topic.
- Treating all forms of content equally. Web crawlers don’t look at Flash or podcasts. Getting information straight from another database requires that the site be database-driven.