Alex Harries's diary

(If you are one of Portsmouth's students who gets all upset at the mention of anything Southampton-based, you might want to turn off now...)

As part of my web-based paranoia, I spend an inordinate amount of time checking out other Students' Union websites. I mentioned how impressed I was with Cambridge SU's site a while back - pretty, accessible, fast to load and easy to find "stuff" on.

SUSU (Scumhampton Students' Union) have been quietly adding in some very interesting-looking toys over the last couple of months - their i-bar, despite a couple of teething problems, is a nice way to customise the site (although I don't know if your customisations are saved with your account or using a cookie, although for a site like SUSU which encourages people to sign in and get involved, I'd hope it follows you around when you sign in).

In the last couple of days they've unveiled their new homepage and I have to say I'm impressed. I haven't pulled the code apart yet, but it looks like there's a nice bit of AJAX in the directory thingbob on the bottom right, and the graphics - for example the gallery link - are crisp and easy to read.

There are a couple of things I don't like about the new design which strike me as small oversights rather than major problems - the headings, for example "Wessex Scene" - aren't clicky, as you might expect on a "portal" page. The site still makes some use of tables (as does UPSU, I'll happily admit), and a little lateral thought might allow them to be removed without any loss of backwards-compatibility for users of older browsers.

I'm also not convinced they've made the best use of white space at the top of the page - there are lots of snippets of information on their site which could be sliced and diced into the top bar without losing the homepage's identity, for example "SUSU suggests", or a précis (or should it be "prècis"?) of the latest news story from a random news feed... There's plenty of dynamic content on the site that could be chosen, but then there's all the time in the world for them to tweak and adjust, so no worries.

Overall, I must say I'm very impressed - there's clearly a lot of thought gone into the redesign, which has built on their existing homepage's strengths. Their attention to accessibility has been criticised - I would suggest a little unfairly - in the forum topic discussing the new homepage, but there's nothing too serious and plenty to congratulate them on.

I s'pose I ought to pull my finger out now then...!