Tuesday, December 07, 2010 by Robert Leeper
We have closed the Community and Prospective Student Surveys, but we still want to hear from you. Leave comments here on the Website Blog and keep the conversation going.
The surveys are giving us some great insight into how our site is used and how our visitors would like to use it in the future. There's a lot more information to come, so keep checking back.
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Wednesday, December 01, 2010 by Robert Leeper
As we work on redesigning the website, we are looking at data that isn't covered in our Community Survey and Prospective Students Survey. One such piece of information is which browsers our visitors are using on the website.
You might be wondering why that matters, so I'll explain. Each browser—Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.—follows its own set of rules. Unfortunately, each browser, and each version of each browser, handles things differently. If we try using a feature on our site that isn't supported by a particular browser, it can make the site look strange or stop working entirely.
Preliminary results*:
- Internet Explorer: 61%
- Safari: 19%
- Firefox: 14%
- Chrome: 5%
- Other: 1%
No surprise that IE is still holding strong at #1, though the margin isn't as great as it once was. If you break the IE results down by each version, it gets more interesting (to web nerds like me).
- IE8: 87.3%
- IE7: 11.3%
- IE6: 1.3%
What does this mean? IE6 has long been a source of frustration in the web community; it doesn't follow web standards (the suggested set of rules) very well at all. The result is that web developers have had to hack their way through sites to get them to look correct in IE6. IE7 and IE8 are incrementally better, and the fact that they have almost completely replaced IE6 means that we can finally consider dropping support for it entirely.
I was a little surprised that Safari has overtaken Firefox for the #2 slot, but since they and Chrome handle standards very well, it's good regardless.
All that to say that it appears we will be able to focus more on a better web experience, and less on fighting browsers to make them behave the way we want them to. It's a win for everyone!
* Browser statistics from Google Analytics, analyzing the traffic to http://www.hsutx.edu/ from Oct. 31, 2010 - Nov. 30, 2010.
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Monday, November 29, 2010 by Robert Leeper
We've launched the first round of updates to the Department of Theatre to get the design matching the new style.
Visit the Department of Theatre here.
We'll be rolling out more updates in the near future.
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Friday, November 19, 2010 by Robert Leeper
We launched the revised Department of Communication pages last night.
Visit the Department of Communication.
The Department of Communication pages now contain a lot of content produced by Communication majors, including some award-winning pieces. Swing by and check it out, and let us know what you think in the comments!
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Thursday, November 18, 2010 by Robert Leeper
We have launched the redesigned Department of Art pages on the website. The new pages can be viewed here: Department of Art.
I've
also updated the "More Events>" links in the Art and Theatre
pages' sidebars to stay within their respective schools/departments
when viewing their details. Hopefully, this will make things a little
less jarring when switching between various views of the site.
There are a few more things to polish before launching the Theatre Department's pages, but those will be rolling out soon.
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Friday, October 29, 2010 by Robert Leeper
Two new major fields of study have been added to the Kelley College of Business section of the site: Nonprofit Management and Public Administration.
We have also pushed the spotlight filtering through to the entire Kelley College of Business section of the site, so only KCOB majors/professors/alumni (when available) will show up on those pages.
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