1. Things that are wrong with the new Oxford web site http://www.ox.ac.uk/

• Breaking OSM licence: http://www.ox.ac.uk/applications/dynamic/map.rm?postcode=OX1+3JP&location=St%20John%27s%20College&id=483 - no attribution

  • (this has now been corrected)
• Can't get to full form for contact search except by doing a simple search for "people"
• Department/college A-Z: have to guess the letter of the college you want rather than being able to browse them all
• 'This is Oxford' on the home page - what on earth is this for? What sort of information am I expecting to see?

• pages aren't valid xHTML, '&' needs to be changed to '& amp;' amongst other URL form GET problems

• About page claims "The University uses Google Search Appliance, accessible through the search box in the header of all pages. Internal users may also use ht://dig to search Oxford's site including intranet pages, a link to which is also provided on search results pages." When no link to ht://dig is on the search results pages.
• CSS is invalid, references non-standard opacity property, and non-existant vertical-text property
• Visually hard to navigate - uniform mass of small pale-blue text on dark blue background.
• no direct links to key resources such as Webmail, Weblearn, OLIS, Oxlip - navigating to these resources is now too hard. (Weblearn and Webmail have now appeared as Quicklinks)
• Some "Quicklinks" (e.g. library) merely duplicate items on main page - implying that they are hard to find on the main page.

• having  alt=""  might satisfy an automated accessibility check but isn't very helpful for disabled users looking at images.

  • especially when the image is the only content of an href!
• 'news' is difficult to find from front page
  • all the links on the front page point to 'unfriendly' coldfusion URLs (then rewrite to 'friendly' URLs)

• Many many broken links - for an illustration of just how emabarrassing this is, see http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=university+of+oxford&meta=&btnG=Google+Search

It may also cause problems for Google (local and public) when both forms of a URL get indexed

• on a 1024x768 screen, the A-Z of colleges boxes take up so much space that you can't see the results underneath without scrolling
• if you turn off Javascript, the headings on the home page pop up a big picture you cannot remove [and then hitting the back button does not take you to the home page, but a previously visited site]

• attachment:BugRiddenScreenShot.jpg screen shot showing lots of bugs (FF 2.0.0.8 on Win XP)

• Why weren't stakeholders given a preview of the new page and a chance to comment?
• The new page references 73 images in its source, very few of which are visible when you initially view the page (as they are hidden by css). This is an unfortunate blend of the disadvantages of images (the 73 images total nearly 2 mb) without the benefits (the visual richness which images give a page). The heavy size of the page will make it very hard for people on low bandwidth pages to access the page. This is bad for any page but doubly so for an index page, as it is a common point of entry.