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I’m loving the G-map :)

Monday, May 18th, 2009

Here’s another screen from the home page, after implementing the GoogleMaps extension.
Unisa Pretoria campus map
To get this map, I had to plot the latitude and longitude as follows.

<googlemap lat=”-25.7678563466577″ lon=”28.2003164291382″ width = “450″ height = “250″ zoom = “17″>
</googlemap>

When I saw the results, my first impression was OMG! WOW! You can see the cars parked at Unisa and everything! And if you click and drag your mouse over the map you can see the surrounding area. You can also zoom in & out, change to Map or Terrain view… Come on, admit you love it too :)

I know, I know, this is a ‘gimmicky’ thing and not essential to the functionality of the site, but I think it’s a must-have for the home page. Why? So that someone visiting for the first time can see immediately that the website is about Unisa, without having to read an explanation. (Ok, maybe you won’t recognise Unisa from the picture of the roof, but the street name is a good hint!)

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A first glimpse of the new site

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

Here’s a screenshot of the navigation sidebar of the new WikiStudent site:

MediaWiki navigation

Ignore the logo - that will change!

The only modification I’ve made (so far) to the default navigation was to change the ‘Random article’ link to ‘Unisa modules A-Z’. (I don’t think we need the ability to jump to a random page on the wiki - people know what they are looking for; who has time to read random / irrelevant information?)

I’m also thinking of changing the ‘Community portal’ label to something more descriptive, such as ‘How you can help’, and the ‘Current events’ maybe to ‘Current tasks’, and the ‘Help’ maybe to ‘Editing help’ to be unambiguous. I’ll see how I feel as the site develops!

A note about the navigation of the new WikiStudent: It’s going to be much simpler than it was on the old site. Once you’re on the page for a module, e.g. MNB102E, you will be able to find everything pertaining to that module on that page. Previously there were different menu items, such as textbooks, downloads, past papers… where the items, e.g. textbooks, for all modules were grouped together, but I think the new layout is an improvement. After all, you’re not searching for any old textbook, but a textbook for a specific module. Much better site architecture this!

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Happy talk must die!

Friday, April 10th, 2009

Time for another quote from the greatest website usability book, Don’t make me think.

We all know happy talk when we see it: It’s the introductory text that’s supposed to welcome us to the site and tell us how great it is, or to tell us what we’re about to see in the section we’ve just entered.

If you’re not sure whether something is happy talk, there’s one sure-fire test: If you listen very closely while you’re reading it, you can actually hear a tiny voice in the back of your head saying, “Blah blah blah blah blah…”

Happy talk is like small talk - content free, basically just a way to be sociable. But most Web users don’t have time for small talk; they want to get right to the beef. You can - and should - eliminate as much happy talk as possible.

That’s exactly what I’m going to do with WikiStudent! The old site had too much introductory / explanatory text on the home page, and people didn’t read it. I’m busy with the new home page right now and have got the entire layout in place, and I’m pleased to say that there is No happy talk at all :-)

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Picture for the home page

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

The home page is the most important page of a website, especially if it is the main landing page, as is the case with WikiStudent. Besides a good logo, a striking image can give visitors a good idea of what a website is about. The old site had one of the following photos display randomly on the home page:

Pretoria Unisa campusand

Cape Town Unisa campusI liked these (self-taken) pics, but I think we can do even better on the new site. It’s not that I’m just bored with these photos, or maybe I am ;-) There can maybe be a separate page with photos of the different campuses, like I suggested earlier.

Anyway, my idea for a picture on the new home page of the wiki is a Google Sattelite Map of Unisa. I’ve got the MediaWiki extension, all I must do now is dig up my GoogleMaps API key and start zooming in on the university. I think it’ll be cool!

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