Life of a Lab Rat

The University has a revamped website. And there's quite the discussion going on about it over at Georg's place (oh, and Andrew lives there too but he's keeping quiet. Sensible man).

It's bright, it's in yer face, and there's lots of content available directly from the front page. Let's be honest here, the idea of a University website is not primarily to make people go 'Oooh, shiny! Look at the pretties!'; people are visiting because they want information. The quality of the research and teaching is not linked to the whizziness of the web site (and if you are so simple-minded as to believe it is, we don't want you here). I have seen too many corporate websites where there's a Flash landing screen and it's almost impossible to find the farking information I went there for.

So, yes — information. And accessibility. They are my two criteria for the 'success', if you like, of web design. Bearing that in mind it's instructive to have a look at the University's front page in Lynx, a text-only browser that, among other things, chokes horribly on inaccessible sites. As hoped, Lynx likes it. Here's a couple of screenshots:

I think Georg and co have done pretty well. You can directly access popular/important information, there's not much in the way of extraneous cruft and you're not distracted by stupid animated frogs or whatever. . . despite being tables-based (argh! Why Georg, why?)