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
• 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
• 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.
• 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.

• '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?