I went to hokiesports.com the other day to look at the football schedule. I started thinking that it has been a while since the website has been updated and to me it looks out of date.
I checked out some sites for other programs (I just went to the football pages) and though some of the other programs sites look a lot more modern.
Tennessee: http://www.utsports.com/sports/m-footbl/tenn-m-footbl-body.html
Ohio State: http://www.ohiostatebuckeyes.com/sports/m-footbl/osu-m-footbl-body.html
Clemson (not as modern): http://www.tigernet.com/football/
Oregon: http://www.goducks.com/index.aspx?path=football
Miami: http://www.hurricanesports.com/SportSelect.dbml?SPID=103763
North Carolina: http://www.goheels.com/SportSelect.dbml?SPID=12962
With the work that athletic department is doing on refreshing/rebranding, you would think that they would update the website.
Comments
I actually really like our design/layout. It's consistent and simple, with some nice images and icons. I think they've completely overhauled it within the last 4-5 years.
Here is Clemson's btw: http://www.clemsontigers.com/SportSelect.dbml?SPID=103701
Tigernet is similar to TKP.
FWIW going 4-5 years between website refreshes is an eternity. That said, for the most part I like the site. I do think there are things that could be improved though, such as easier access to news articles. The way it's currently laid out, there is no ability to immediately see the headlines of the last articles on the homepage like you can on most sites. You either need to cycle through the last 6 stories one at a time using the central graphic or click the link to 'More News' to get a longer list.
The fact it isn't a responsively designed website is unacceptable in 2016, especially for an engineering school. Half of all web traffic is mobile.
Excellent point. I had forgotten that since I gave up on even attempting to access via mobile years ago.
Pssssh, what would you know about website design and what kind of web traffic VT sports sites get, anyway?
I did a ton of testing on one of my company's web applications when we switched it over to a responsive design. It was a relatively quick process for us but it was also a tiny, tiny website. Information architecture and user experience were big deals but the coding side wasn't too bad. Testing across devices in all our supported OS/browser combinations was terribly repetitive. Safari haunts my dreams.
If you weren't using it, you should know about https://www.browserstack.com/
Seent it, evaluated it, rejected it. Good to know you're in the know, though.
Interesting. What did you use instead?
Manual testing and watir.
If you could only see my face right now.
The answer to "why the long face?"
I failed to find a picture of crying Sarah Jessica Parker to respond to you. Please pretend I did:
<SJPCrying.gif>
I got you
this.
the video player, anyone?.... how was it that bad for that long?
and it's not just the athletic department. don't get me started on the alumni office which knows no bounds of technological ineptitude. There are just too many people in charge of technology that do not understand it. For an institution known as a "Tech" school that uses the moniker "Invent the Future" there is no excuse for how poor much of it is.
no. not this time. I agree with you most times about people giving more money, but not this time bud.
this is not the reason. It does not cost much money in an Athletic's Dept budget to design and host a website. There is MORE THAN ENOUGH to do this and have it be top of the line. And it certainly does not take more money than what they are already spending for the alumni office to actually give a damn and become organized. Hell, they could even keep everything hard copied but at least have it proactive and organized. It is neither, and that's not a product of money that's a product of poor management and apathy.
Amen. Pay a CS undergrad for a summer internship (cheap as all getout) and everything here gets fixed. I seriously don't understand why the Athletic Dept. hasn't leveraged our great computer engineering/computer science programs to make this happen.
I've been looking and for some reason website redesign isn't mentioned for any college at any level in a line item of a budget. While I agree it's not a large cost in capital outlay what would be the cost in man hours to those departments? What other projects are they not working on to work on this. In terms of priorities I think the website for the athletic department is down the list. As for the academic and alumni side it should be a priority. Networking should be a top goal of the school for graduates.
Guitarman explained its ease well. It would not take significant man hours at all, rather a few minutes in weekly.meetings and a few presentations. it's design would be outsourced and thus the bulk of the work would be done by others. Once the new website is created, reviewed and approved then those that manage content now on the exisiting website, do so on the new website.
We might not even need to outsource the design. Between Psych, Industrial Eng, and Industrial Design departments for the cognitive ergo/user experience, and Comp Sci and Comp Eng for architecture and coding, I'm sure there are enough people in the university that would jump at the chance to redesign the site and get valuable experience doing so. Maybe even a few of us alumni in the industry could offer some mentoring.
I meant outsourcing from the actual Ath Dept staff in response to HokieFireman's comment about the cost in man hours. But I wholeheartedly agree with you.
Oh, word. Yeah, bet.
This is a chronic problem across the ENTIRE university. There are people, just as you say, in charge of technology that do not understand it. There are people who are supposed to reach out and engage with students that have absolutely nothing in common with them and who know virtually nothing about them.
I'm gonna step on some toes with this opinion and I apologize in advance for this but the university heavily favors older alumni, particularly those with military experience, when it comes to hiring. That's all well and good in some cases but older military types do not usually identify all that well with young college students. Every watched Gran Torino? Yeah. Asking someone who has put in 20, 30 years into the military to then come back and effectively communicate and engage with a 17 or 18 year old freshly in college is like trying to mix oil and vinegar. Sometimes it works, and it's beautiful when it does, but most of the time they're going to repel each other and end up looking sad.
I had a friend get hired at Tech as the campus sustainability planner (affectionately called her Chief Hippie). There were other candidates that were just as qualified but she got the job because she was younger. That office was making an effort to get younger to better identify with the student body (y'know, the thing that gives the university reason to exist). Because of the older generation that was already firmly in place it was incredibly difficult and frustrating to get anything significant accomplished and it finally got to the point that rather than continue working at Tech she jumped at the chance to go back to grad school to get a 2nd Master's degree.
I understand that experience is needed, you can't just throw a bunch of young, new people into a job and expect them to do well without some experienced people there to guide them. But you want to keep advancing the university? You want to "Invent the Future?" Cool, that's awesome, make hiring decisions that reflect that.
.....That was a lot more ranty than I intended, sorry gang.
agreed. not so much about military, but with older people in general. I appreciate the experience they have but not the fact that these same people are in charge of things they hopelessly do not understand. I tried to explain the significance of being able to have a searchable database of alumni at my fingertips and it fell, I believe, literally on partially deaf ears.
I made the point before but the schools over here that have active alumni bases are killing it money wise with Chinese. USCw by far the leader in that regard but there are a lot of schools now that hold regular events from all over the country. conversely myself and another VT grad have simply wanted to have an alumni dinner and have never once gotten any relevant info to help us. Instead having to use LinkedIn as our Alumni database. Absolutely unacceptable.
I said this before as well, but a friend of mine over here went to a prep school in the states and they have the entire history of that school's alumni on an App. Everyone dead and alive that has ever gone through that school is searchable on that App, and the alive Alumni have contact info, bios sometimes a family tree, and known relatives that are also alumni or famous/well known. Amazing considering VT, the "Tech" school, does not seem to use any method of database.
Joe found our next great TKP sportswriter with a tweet; perhaps we can drop a tweet on behalf of HokieSports.com and the almumni associations?
/s (maybe?)
Just having someone in charge with the right attitude to get these things done is sufficient. Don't think we have to trash old people: I worked creating software for 35 years (in civilian industries) and I also favor the type changes fernleyhokie is advocating and would be one of the first to use them.
On the lighter side, If you would just speak up loud enough for us old fogies to hear your young ass, maybe we could get something done here !!! :--)
P.S. - Just emailed copy of fernleyhokie's remarks to an old rat classmate of mine who is on the VT Alumni Board and has put together many of our squadron reunions in the past.
I would think an alumni database would be more of a privacy thing than a technological one.
Privacy? To the Alumni Office? Shit, those guys are better at tracking you down than the IRS
They're pretty good at finding you, but sharing their info is where the privacy issues would come to play.
If they looked like Isla, I'd think donations would go up.
If you don't want info on then it should be an option not to list. However, if I can find large amounts on linkedin and facebook ( of whom i cannot find on the existing alumni systems) i doubt those alumni would have issue with contact info being released. If its really smart it optional to link those social media profiles to your almuni profile.
When I signed up to access the alumni database and updated my information it did give me option about sharing information, but almost everyone on these databases wants old friends to be able to contact them. And yes, the alumni office has contacted me much more often than the IRS.
Appreciate it. Right now, my solution is to trash everything about the exisiting systems and start fresh. No sense trying to make a dumb, outdated system try to perform for today's world, which would be the equivalent of asking people to write letters and post them in response to tweets.
Bingo
Not trying to denigrate all older peeps, just the ones that don't seem to listen or bother to try to figure out why they should care nor find the right person who does understand it to actual be responsible for updating the technology used.
Nor I, but it is maddeningly frustrating at times isn't it?
Somewhat related: My grandfather back in Chesapeake just upgraded his laptop from Windows 8 to 10 and dear god the phone calls. They just don't stop!
Indeed it is
Never give your older brother a smart phone if he's never had one before...... Seriously.
One of the companies I worked for was international in nature and we did look into what was necessary to include Chinese and other languages with many more characters than our existing databases allotted. We found that we would need to change the format of how we stored the data in every file and change and recompile every program we had over the databases. Since Chinese school children study English as a mandatory requirement in school and many of them speak better English than many of us born in this country so that they can read the technical manuals of the world, it was deemed to be more than our small company wanted to take on at the time. That's not to say that the features you desire can not be incorporated in many other ways apart from the oriental script for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. I would like to think with the large number of foreign students VT has coupled with it's resources being much more extensive than any of the companies I programmed for, that they might seriously consider making the conversion to multi language as well as the other feature upgrades now common in so many places. Every field reference on every screen would also need to be rewritten and reference a database to determine which language to display in each spot on each screen. That's what intrigues me about your reference to USCw already doing this (wondering if they may have come up with a more generic way of handling this at a higher level of programming).
oh I am not asking for it to be in Chinese at all. keep it in english.
Agree we could get it done strictly in English faster, but If we want them to think more long term and modern, why not make it easier for everyone in every way ? If we're going to upgrade, the newer object oriented programming languages are much better at the types of things you're asking for anyway. See no reason we can't do what USC does from a technical standpoint. If you harness some of our better students, it could also provide a lot of people with good job offers upon graduation because there are a ton of old systems out there that need serious upgrading.
Ah i see what your saying. yes, USCw runs it only in English, however the Chinese alumni on this side have created the USC-china alumni database themselves that is bilingual. It is A LOT easier to make Chinese platforms bilingual than it is English platforms.
I would love to do this, but then I would need alumni info of those in China, both Chinese nationals and non-Chinese, which unfortunately seems simply to not exist or at best exists in a frustratingly little amount of info.
*grabs a bullhorn set to maximum* PUT IN YOUR HEARING AIDS GRANDPA!!!
Seriously though, I didn't mean to trash all of you old fogies, I've worked with some pretty cool ones and I take pride in being able to crack Dad jokes with the best of them.
Now, am I ok to stay on your lawn or would you prefer me to get off of it? I have bourbon I can share
Oooohhhhh bourbon, my favorite beverage. Welcome good friend. :--)
Hope you aren't drinking that red and white VT wine in your moniker, tried some once and it tastes really awful.
(as bad a ripple back in the day).
Oh heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell no. I do love wine, I try to hit up the Vintage Cellar here in Bburg every Saturday for their free wine tasting, and I don't consider myself a wine snob by any measure but the stuff in my pic might just be some of the worst stuff I've ever tasted, aside from the stuff we tried to make in our dorm room sophomore year
The only thing we fermented in our rooms when I was at VT were "banana bombs" to put in upper classmen's closets. Explosions messed up a lot of clothes.
https://secure.hosting.vt.edu/alumni.vt.edu/Directory/auth/login.php
Need an active PID and password, but once you log in you are able to search the alumni database. Not the most user-friendly, but it works. Obviously, everyone also has the option of enabling privacy settings to hide his/her information.
Multiple issues here.
1) needs active PID and password. I know a lot of alumni who do not have.
2) even with it is not easy to use and is very limited in info
3) is the epitomy of the "oh well, good enough" apathy that is pervasive. How about better than simpky having something? How about we invent the damn future of alumni databases? Or failing that, update it to something contemporary and more user friendly.
Oh, I completely agree. I think VT has major shortcomings in that, although they do offer some helpful online services and tools, very little is user-friendly. I just tried to log in and change my alumni contact info, but in order to do that I must log into Hokiespa, which now requires a 2-factor login for all users. Not very useful for alumni who simply want to just update their information.
I agree. Just having something and saying "good enough" isn't good enough. It's a shame considering our strengths in technology and science and our entire brand is focused on being forward-thinking and futuristic. Plenty of work to be done.
Agree.
Yuuuuuup. Get rid of Banner and hire some 20-somethings right out of college (like, y'know, VT), and see how quickly things change for the better.
If I'm ever in a murderous mood, Banner is usually to blame. Banner and small children.
Careful what you post. You wouldn't like banner when he's angry.
Who is this Banner guy ? Do we need to leave a banana bomb in his closet ?
How is this gif not here yet???? Cmon guys, get serious! Season is almost here.
The main thing I use Hokiesports for is the schedule. In that regard, I like the layout on our site better than all of the ones linked above, although Miami, Oregon, and UNC are close.
And Clemson's site is the worst of the bunch.
Hey, for my purposes I liked the old site. There was a list of actual words down the left side. I clicked football, and it went to football. I could then click news, or schedule, etc., and boom. I'm sure we've come a long way since then, but current version seems like "we need something more fancy, this looks good". There are some useless school websites out there, though, and this isn't one of them.
Just hit F5
Can't find F5 on my cell phone keyboard
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Did you check your TCP/IP Settings?
Enable Cookies?
Is this like hitting "any key" ? Whatever happened to that darned key ?
IMO the UNC and Clemson sites look even less modern than hokiesports.
Can we also vote for an update to the VT bookstore site? It's bad enough that Campus Emporium runs circles around them in terms of shipping and customer service but my god, that website is awful.
Considering the webmaster was on a cross country bike tour all summer, I'd say not soon unless you flood Whit's email with suggestions and/or complaints.
I believe we are planning ahead, and looking at what we need to when this internet fad passes by. If enough people complain they will probably but a band aid on it and try to pass it off as the next great thing. Kinda like with the ACC network. /s