I'm putting them in black type so that people can give their opinions of the design without reading mine first if they want to.
- I like the modern look. It’s very much a look that fits in with lots of schools and universities around the country right now.
- I love the ability to post video. That could be a great place for us to highlight some of our programs. We will need to actually generate some content, however, if we’re going to put that front and center, and generation of video content tends to be a lot more labor intensive than does print content. If we put up one video and it stays there – or if we rotate among out of date content – it will be a giant sore spot, though.
- The page seems hugely busy and jumbled to me. There are links to every possible thing that anyone could possibly want (grades, mission, vision, registration, visual arts, athletics, treasurer, and a dozen other things). Because of this huge amount of links, I find the page very hard to navigate visually.
- The horizontal navigation bar above the Viking head seems more suited to the district pages than it does to the individual school page, as do many of the menu options down the left hand side (employment opportunities, our schools, district archives, eNews Sign-Up, school board, mission and vision, central office, district news)
- My eyes are drawn very firmly to the football photo as well as the Viking head. I don’t get any visual prompting as to where I should look next for the important information. Out of curiosity, will these photos rotate as the page is loaded or will they provide a different, static photo with each reload of the page?
- There are dozens of pages I can think of that would have no current home under the various navigation schemes – OGT tips page, technology department site, Odin’s Word, the science department, my course website,
- There seem to be duplications among the various links.
- For example, calendar is linked under quick links (on the left) and This Week at Princeton (in the bottom right) as well as – maybe – in the “One Stop Shop for Parents” in the top right listed as “schedules”.
- On the district page, the “Quick Link” to Our Schools seems redundant with the full links in the red, left area to each school.
- In the “Quick Links” there is a link to School Board and Central Office, and there are separate links to each Central Office Department across the top.
- The high school page doesn’t seem to be rendering correctly at the top of the page. On the district page, there are two news stories (?) up top (the right one fades into the “One Stop Shop for Parents”, but these don’t show on the high school page. Nor does the phrase “One Stop Shop for Parents”.
- I like the “This week at Princeton” bar to the right. Will these be school-specific or will they simply be the same three or so events for the whole district?
- I don’t care for the Inspire to Dream… logo in the bottom right. I don’t feel that it serves to contribute anything other than an additional image to draw my eye.
- On the district page, the names of the schools are nicely arranged, but I notice that the full name for our middle school (PCMS) has been shortened for what I assume are aesthetic reasons.
- The possibilities of ‘District Archives’ – though I don’t like that link from the school specific pages – intrigues me. I have been collecting lists and information for the past couple of years – as well as audio podcasts with a couple of Princeton historians – in hopes of putting together a district/high school history site and have just never had the manpower to get that together.
- I don’t see anywhere for a staff directory (unless that is the intent of ‘contacts’ in the One Stop Shop for Parents). It’s something that has been sorely lacking for a while on the high school and district sites.
- It’s interesting that nothing on the district or school specific site actually mentions our academics. There are links to music, athletics, visual arts, treasurer, superintendent, school board, central office – but not a single link to anything that I would call academic departments.
- The Princeton High School logo at the very top has an issue with the grey bar behind the words High School. The grey changes colors at the end of the final L.
All in all, I see the need for the change. Things need to modernize and become more visually interesting.
I also understand that there is a desire to have all the district school websites become homogenized. It’s not a desire that I hold, but I know that my view of the district is very different from other people’s.
I don’t care for the apparent shift toward a single website which is for Princeton City Schools while only allowing (out of a page design of roughly 940 x 730 pixels – 686200 pixels total) only 470 x 340 pixels plus 240 x 260 pixels of video (for 222200 pixels total) of actual school-specific content. That’s less than 33% of the page being actual school content, leaving room for three news stories at any one time.
And I, admittedly, don’t care for the overall design shift from plain, simple, dumpy (all of which I fully admit that the high school mainpage certainly is now) but with a focus on communicating useful information at a glance while celebrating the interesting things happening around the building to a much more professional site which is visually overwhelming while providing an surfeit and duplication of links.
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