I tried to pick a site that you might find valuable. I heard about this one on the radio. It’s gazettenet’s new site for the 5 colleges. The layout of the site is fascinating. Only the top 2/3 of the page are ‘scrollable’, the bottom is fixed from page to page. At first, I very much liked that feature. It was completely new to me, so I thought it was exciting. This ‘bottom fixture’ followed me around throughout my surfing of the site. It’s a permanent <home> button. It did get to me after a while, no matter how many links I tried to follow, it wouldn’t go away. It was like a trap. Upon scrutiny of the source, it turns out that all of those links are being run on top of aXis. I also realized how simple the HTML code was for these sites. You definitely have to show us how to do this in class.
Content-wise, I was impressed with "The Scene". It was packed full of information about things to do in the valley. It had easy access to movies, books, music and magazines through the use of scroll bars. This made the content very eas y to access. The breadth of information available was pretty impressive. It looks like they put a lot of work on creating these pages. Some of the information is however not completely updated, for example, ‘The Peacemaker’ hasn’t made it to the movie links yet.
One of the problems with having their own content is that I wish they had more links to related sites. For example, when I went to George Clinton, there were several links, but all Axis related. I would have enjoyed seeing a Parliament and a Pfunk li nk (assuming they exist).
This was redeemed in the "News" section, where they had links to dozens of country wide newspapers (They forgot to list the Daily Hampshire Gazette as a choice, DUH!). These links were a good idea since the news they had lacked content, as they were only the local campus papers
The "Career" section also lacked content. Overall, I think they have the start of an amazing site. Once they have more content in the pages, this will become a very valuable site. Right now, they’ve tried to offer everybody everything, the y’ve presented it well, but the site needs daily work if the content is going to be up to date and therefore valuable. Also, they shouldn’t be afraid to have people leave their site, if it’s good, they’ll come back. There’s no need to haunt them with ev ery single link they follow.