STC Eastern Ontario Blog

I miss the old TECHWR-L site. I’ve been trying really hard to give the new one a fair go since it was unveiled earlier this year but that’s easier said than done.

It used to be an easy matter to search the mailing list archives to find a discussion pertinent to whatever debate you were having with yourself or your colleagues. Now, the search features on the site only search the non-mailing-list parts of the site—if you want to search the mailing list, you have to go to Google itself and search for your keywords along with the term techwr-l in order to turn up any mailing list results.

And while the new site offers some potentially useful new community features including personal blogs and classified ads, that very aspect means that it is prone to spam, spam, and more spam. Blog spam, comment spam, article spam, classifieds spam. For example, when I checked the site this morning, its home page was displaying 9 spam articles/blog posts. The spam makes it so much harder to actually find the little nuggets of goodness (and there definitely are some) on the site. And it gives the site a very unprofessional look. I flagged the spam in question for admin action and it appears that it’s now been taken care of by Eric Ray (site owner) but still, someone should be leaping on it without relying on other users to flag it.

Miscellaneous annoyances:

• The affiliate Amazon links that crop up, largely inappropriately, in the text of various articles and informational pages
• The layout — The pages have been designed so that you have to be viewing the site in a maximized browser window at a minimum resolution of 1024 X 768—and even then, on some pages (such as some of the event calendar pages) that just isn’t wide enough. And everything looks the same so it’s hard to distinguish articles from blog posts from anything else.
• The navigation — It’s so hard to find anything. There’s the search problem noted above but the navigation in general just has you sort of wandering around trying to get your bearings.

  A “how to use this site” page would be a great help. For example, some blog posts have ratings but there doesn’t seem to be a way for a registered user to actually rate a post so where do they come from? And people are not always using the community features appropriately. For example, some people are using their blogs as though the whole site is a forum and are posting questions there. Mind you, I blame that on the fact that everything kind of looks the same on the site so that it’s difficult for someone not aware of how the various components really should be used to understand what they should be doing.

  A sitemap would also be useful. Not to mention having a search that actually searched the entire site.

That being said, if you have the patience to wade through the site, you will actually find some interesting articles and blog posts. And the mailing list archives are frequently useful. I don’t know that I see the site living up to its potential.

This entry was posted by Kitty on Saturday, May 26th, 2007 at 12:28 and is filed under Technical Writing, techwr-l. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.