Nail in the coffin

[sunil]

as soon as academic work kicks in, I expect The Sinner will get even busier.

Hah, so true...

No one gives a flying fuck about the W3C standards. They want a site that looks good and is easy to use.

I would agree with the sentiment that users want a site which looks good and is easy to use. But as a developer myself, W3C standards (although sometimes a pain) ease that process. If something isn't at least reasonably standards-compliant, different browsers will render it differently. Then you get complaints from users that something's broken - but it looks good in your browser. You manage to track the problem down and fix it, and it breaks in someone else's browser... and so on.

The situation isn't perfect; not all browsers behave themselves and you still have to provide "hacks" for some of them. But it's a damn sight easier to do that if you're working from a standardised, recognised base-level than if you don't bother with the standards in the first place!

I appreciate that the summer holiday is not representative, so what about last week then.

Last week is hardly representative either actually - most people are either travelling up or down the country, or out meeting new people or old friends. These coming weeks will be the measure of the site as it takes off. Once academic work starts and the procrastination bug kicks in, The Sinner will come into its own.

I would agree with this - especially amongst new students in St Andrews, most of whom live in halls in their first year. Most halls organise a huge number of events during their first week, plus there's the Union events and the University events like matriculation which are kind of hard to avoid.

Even though I'd already visited The Sinner once or twice before I arrived in Sept 2003, I didn't go on it at all for Fresher's week and the first week or two of term - there was just way too much going on.

However, we're in the second week after a complete site overhaul - things haven't settled down yet, and most of the people involved in getting the new site up and running have either been involved with societies' stuff for Freshers' Week, or out of the country! I've hardly spent any time at all on the redesign, leaving it in Fawksie's and Orudge's hands; merely checking in on progress at the end of each night and making suggestions and requests.

As we've integrated software from three seperate major open-source projects, each with their own standards and ways of doing things, it is unsurprising that there are inconsistencies in terms of fonts, graphics and so on. But we're doing our best, and these things take time to sort out.

I came down with really nasty tonsillitus in the week before we launched, and I'm only just beginning to recover properly, so the majority of work has been left to Fawksie and Orudge - and there's only so much 2 people can do at once!

Sunil

[Stu le taxi]

Having viewed a bit more of the site I would say that the thread originator does have a point about the mishmash of fonts; in particular, this forum uses sans serif fonts while much of the rest of the site uses serif, including - most jarringly - the clickable green navigation buttons which appear near the top of the page through much of the site.

I remember that when web design was in its infancy the serif Times New Roman was very popular (if only because it was the default font) while these days it's rare to see much in the way of serif fonts on professionally designed sites, or any site come to that!

As far as I'm aware a fundamental rule in publishing is that sans serif fonts could be used for titles, while serif should be used for the main body text because it was easier to read. However, the move towards sans serif on the web seems to contradict that, particularly when it's generally regarded as being more difficult to read text on screen than on paper, but I'm no expert in these matters. (Indeed, a couple of current newspaper sites such as the Independent[in IE7, at least] and the Guardian an seem to reverse the rule by using serif fonts for titles but sans serif for body text.)

Perhaps the thread originator is correct in saying that the death knell has been sounded for the Sinner (and I have no particular viewpoint on that), but it's surely stretching credulity to suggest that the design revamp will be instrumental in that regard.