Website Disaster

The Public Health Sciences website, that is an awful website. And although I hate to admit it, but it was my baby. When I worked at the department they asked me and another girl to not update the website, but overhaul it completely. Thing was, neither Alexis nor I had any web design experience and Dreamweaver was unknown to both of us before this little experiment. Well, we thought we would give it a shot. Here's where the disaster begins to unfold. Templates, they were unknown to us so every single page was constructed from scratch every single time, every single page (yes, I will be emphatic about that). The overall design scheme is horrendous. First of all, it is Clemson-ized to every possible extreme. Orange and purple as strewn throughout without any regards to aesthetic appeal. I think that because the orange is so bright and vibrant and the purple is so overwhelming that it is even visually hard for people to look at (not easy on the eyes). The visual cues in regards to what constitutes a link and what doesn't are not at all easily identified.

In regards to the rules of proximity, alignment, repetition, and contrast, I think we break them all in very bad ways. Although the site seems organized enough, broken up into categories for students, faculty and staff, alumni, and internship, it gets a little messy from there. I think that the hierarchical structure would be better represented if the page itself didn't look so disorganized. It has the appearance, but in reality, the information is together. Everything throughout the site is aligned differently: text, images, links, etc. There is no definition to the page, which I think also heavily contributes to its disorganization. In regards to repetition, there is plenty of that in regards to color and alignment, but unfortunately it doesn't help the overall look or usability because those things that are repetitive are not done very well. Finally, in regards to the contrast, it is a concordant relationship: from the colors to the text. Every page looks alike, again, not in a good way. It forces the user to work too hard to find the information and could often present itself as confusing as there are no visual cues to indicate where the user has gone or is going.

Again, this was the first attempt at a website using Dreamweaver, which was almost 2 years ago now. I know you're probably thinking, why didn't you change it? Time constraints. Unfortunately it fell off the priority list, but don't think I didn't know how bad it was, or rather is.