Hollidazed

Last week was the annual FE First awards arranged by the Marketing Network (Marketers in Post 16 Education). For those of you who don’t has the pleasure of working in the UK Further Education system in marketing, communications or design this may not seem a big deal but these awards are the closest we ever come to glitz, glamour and a small award certificate/trophy. (I should say at this point that I have never actually attended!)

So why am I mentioning this seemingly uninteresting minor event on the larger social calender? …well it’s because every year they give prizes to the “best” current College websites so I thought I would share the results and give a few thoughts – although I hope you will make up your own minds:

Winner – North Devon College

Uses Flash navigation and inline styles, the judges said the site stood out as it was “using design techniques more often used within the private sector as opposed to education”. This in indeed true as most education sites that are worth anything these days design exclusively with web standards unlike this site. Some things here are built okay and look alright but overall I’m disappointed that this is deemed to be the best thing in the sector.

Runner Up – Deeside College

I am even more disappointed with this site purely because it has been entirely built with tables and will be completely inaccessible to many users.

Honourable Mention – Aberdeen College

If I had designed this website I would be disappointed, but only at not having won this award easily. I think this is a great looking site with a great little user interface and to seal the deal it’s built really well using web standards (style and behaviour kept separate from content) and accessible to everyone!

Honourable Mention – James Watts College of Further Education

Again built exclusively with tables – make up your own mind please?

To sum up…

I am disappointed because these awards have essentially given the wrong sort of encouragement to people who are getting it wrong when it comes to best practice and providing the best user experience possible. These people should clearly be encouraged to evaluate how they work and not told how great they are when they have a inaccessible website.

I’m really please the Aberdeen College website was in there and I’ve seen some other College websites this year that were overlooked and are equally as good. I really do think web standards are beginning to make an impact in the area of both College and University websites in the UK. This hopefully means that the accessibility levels of sites is much improved while I’m sure various institutions are also now seeing some of the business benefits of web standards.

The BBC news website ran a story the other day titled “most websites are failing disabled” and it’s a shame that the Further Education sector choose to highlight just those sorts of websites last week instead of celebrating the sites that have clearly moved in the right direction producing both visually appealing and accessible sites.

I can see that building a commercially successfully site that is accessible can seem difficult to some but in web standards we have the tools and the education sector must surely embrace this. There are plenty of good recent examples of education websites that meet this brief… just please, as a general rule, don’t look at the one’s that win awards!

I’m pleased to say that I’ve just launched a new version of the Central Sussex College website. The new version is geared up for IE7 with virtually no css hacks and a general spring clean for good measure sorting out a few of the design and usability issues and taking out most (the rest to follow shortly) of the obtrusive inline javascript that sections of the site previously relied on. Feel free to post any comments and I’ll talk about it more in the future.

I’ve got to admit that I continue to be disappointed with the amount of FE college’s that simply don’t seem to care about web standards and accessibility. Although there are still some issues with the site I work on we are at least trying to work towards a completely inclusive experience for all our users by using the right technologies in CSS, (X)HTML and DOM scripting (Javascript). I was unfortunately not surprised by Robin Christopherson taking apart South Cheshire College‘s site at @media recently and there are many more I could (and maybe) should name… but I’ll save this for another day… maybe some further research/fact finding is in order!

Well my first web conference was most enjoyable… here is a brief round-up of my highlights…

Day 1

Eric Meyer‘s Keynote presentation was an enjoyable journey through the last ten years showing how CSS and standards have developed and as a relatively recent convert to CSS layout (20 months down and counting) it was good to get a history lesson to kick things off.

Jeremy Keith‘s session on using DOM Scripting was one of the things I was most looking forward to. I have found the Dom Scripting book really useful this year and this session didn’t disappoint. As I had hoped Jeremy took some of the ideas in the book a bit further looking at how to plug the holes in CSS using the DOM.

Although I was a little disapointed to have to miss Dave Shea’s web typography session (looking forward to the podcast)… I felt I owed it to my employers who had paid for this conference trip to find out what I could about the new release of IE and the launch date. Chris Wilson pretty much said what I was expecting (having now test driven the beta 2 release). He pretty much confirmed that ie7 would be arriving by the end of the year although he seemed to me to suggest the next 2/3 months. One interesting thing he also mentioned was the IE7 ReadinessToolkit.

I was originally going to go to the WCAG 2.0 debate at this point in proceedings but having read much commentary (and the now infamous Joe Clark article) concerning the new guidelines I decided to avoid this… based on how much useful information I have recently got out of reading Andy Budd‘s Web Mastery book I thought his session would be more useful in the short term.

I’ve got to be honest and say that Jeffrey Veen – ‘Designing the Next Generation of Web App’s was not a session I was that bothered about when I first saw the programme but it turned out to be rather good and Jeffrey was an excellent speaker looking at the changing face of the web.

Day 2

Dan Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web Design was was a good way to start the day but it was Robin Christopherson’s session, ‘Beyond a Code Audit’, that turned out to be my highlight. Although suffering from the WiFi problem I was really impressed with his content and it really helped me to actually see a visually impaired user working with the web first hand. As I work as an in-house designer for an FE college I was particuarly interested to watch him take apart the South Cheshire College website.

I unfortuately missed the first half of Cameron Moll’s – Mobile session but I did pick up a few interesting ideas from what I did catch and can now say I’ve finally installed Opera Mini on my Motorola V3.

The Strategic CSS Management panel was fairly useful but didn’t blow me away while Tantek Celik‘s – ‘Microformats: Evolving the Web’ was also excellent and I expect to be using microformats much more in my work this year.

Finally, the Hot Topics panel was very entertaining and finished off a good conference.

Looking forward to next year.

Links to presentation notes

• Good Design vs Great Design Panel
• Jeremy Keith – Using DOM Scripting to Plug the Holes in CSS
• Andy Budd – Bug Hunting
• Jeffrey Veen – Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps
• Nate Koechley – Yahoo! vs. Yahoo!