Screen Design

Upon first arrival to the South Heart School home page there are immediately things that can be noticed about the poor construction of this site. The navigation on the left hand side has images that are separating and causing a major break up. The left hand navigation also stretches way too far down on the page and beyond the content itself. If you take a look at the background image you can see that it is a poor image with a lot of pixelation. The background image is also poorly tiled and the designer did not think about how large this page could potentially be viewed on different displays. I also just feel that the overall design of the page is very amateur and something junior high kids could conjure up in a moments notice. There was no thought to how the lay out was going to work with the overall flow of the web page.

Content

A simple minded person that already knows about this school was the content write for this page. If I were a stranger to the area and wanted to find out more about this school its pretty hard to get that here. A one sentence location explanation and total enrollment is given on the home page. I guess they didn't feel the need to describe the school a little bit more and actually keep the reader engaged. I then followed a link to the athletics page where I found more links to more pages with more useless information. No photos or brief descriptions of the teams were available only links to schedules. Speaking of schedules there is a schedules link, but only takes you to the lunch schedule and the teachers schedules. Needless to say as I moved forward onto the other links there was little to be found. The content on this page is short and lacking.

Accessibility

Load times aren't much of a problem with this web page mostly because the lack of any creative content. About the only piece of media that is somewhat of a hassle when it comes to accessing is the picture viewer on the front page. It seems as though that the picture viewer does not really appreciate that viewers use other browsers to pop it out into a new window. WIth Firefox I was able to open the pop out picture viewer into a new window, but with Safari it refused to allow me to do so. When it comes to readability of this page there's not much of a problem. There is so little content that is spaced with plenty of room to spare and a font that pretty much all browsers should recognize, why would there be problems reading?

Navigation

As previously talked about in the screen design there is something really wrong with the navigation on the first page. The images seem to be separating and spreading out far beyond the little content that is written. All the links seem to be directing you to their correlating pages but its within these pages where a user could get a little discouraged. In nearly all pages there is no navigation that will either take you back, to another page, or even get you back "home". My favorite page is the faculty one. Here you will find a list of faculty all that have a link to their own page, which seems a little unnecessary and too much work really. I would consider the navigation on this site as poor and amateur, quickly done and without any consideration to where the viewer would like to go next.

Media Use

Media use is very limited on this page. The few things they do use are quite distracting and something any amateur designer could add onto a page. The first piece of annoying media I noticed is the scrolling marquee at the start of the site. Back and forth it goes, serving no purpose at all other then the, hey look what I did factor. The next piece of media used is the Jostens photo viewer. Again something that any amateur designer could have simply inserted into their page with ease. I find this piece of media quite obnoxious. There is no indication that you can click on it, I found out by actually clicking on the media. Once I clicked it was slow to load and the overall I just think that there would be an better solution with a little more thought. The over use of pdf files is also a very bad use of media. Since I've started this project I have probably downloaded over 20 pdf's just because I've clicked on random links that I have downloaded these stupid files.

Interactivity

Interactivity is lacking on this site, in fact I would say it doesn't even exist in any form. A site like this could really have some form of involvement for students and faculty. For instance similar to this scripting class where Mr. Keston has taken discussions, links and other useful materials and added them to the web. The faculty page would be a great start for South Heart School. Each teacher could upload any notes or useful materials to their own faculty page. Oh wow, I just stumbled across some interactivity. It can be found on the counselors corner. At the counselors corner you can find links to student loan information, act registration and a few other links that might help prepare students for college. I think they should take what the counselor has done and apply it to each of the faculty members pages. Oh did I mention the janitor has a page?

Consistency

I've covered quite a few of the errors of this web page in previous descriptions that relate to the overall consistency of the site. Navigation is quite difficult once you get into pages within pages. Its really quite hard to get back and there seems to be too many pages that simply don't need to be there and could be incorporated into the page before it. Fonts do seem to be consistent colors change a little bit which could be a quick fix. The images and graphics they use seem to become a little messed up between pages. On the first page you'll see a banner at the top, as you move into other pages the banner moves to a different location. This is something they could change to make consistent with other pages. The background image is for surely a problem though. It appears as though they wanted it to repeat, or they just did not consider the sizes in which other users were going to be viewing it in. Overall the site is not all that consistent and could use a little help when it comes to S.C.A.N.M.I.C.