I can't wait to get this thing off the ground!

Am I the only one having some serious issues with the new BG Views?

While I applaud the newspaper's decision to move to a more interactive platform, I wonder if the current system is much of an improvement. True, the forum system itself seems relatively user-friendly and registration is a breeze, but there are "features" on the site which either don't work, or don't work well.

Among the problems on the site are, first and foremost, the changing highlights section at the top of the front page. If the size remained static, it'd be fine, but with large photos scrolling through small bits of text, the location of other things below that on the page keeps changing. Maybe I'm a little picky, but I'd guess that'll compel a lot of folks to just leave - why bother sticking around the site if the site makes it a pain to do so?

In addition to this, the search feature seems to be essentially useless if you're looking for something specific - say the pompous, pretentious piece by the faculty last week on "manners." I tried searching for a number of terms in the piece and it didn't show up, even when I sorted by date and limited the date to a two-week period. What's more, sorting by date appears to have no effect whatsoever, with articles showing up in various months and different years with no apparent chronological order. What gives? I don't expect the site to make the newspaper fully searchable, but if you're not going to make what's there at least functional, why bother?

Lastly, while I know things are a bit in flux, a good rule of web design and interactive communities in general is to avoid the "coming soon" feature, whether it's explicit or implicit. So, for example, if you plan to actually have the links to "Campus" and "Opinion" go to pages listing articles in those sections, wait until the links are functional to put them up; otherwise, those doing the clicking think it's just carelessness and a broken link.

The site is making great progress, and has a much nicer aesthetic than the previous BG News site; now if you could just make the functionality catch up to the aesthetics, you'd be doing great.

Oh, PS
Apparently the forums aren't so user-friendly; when I click "submit" to post this thread in the "Suggestions" forum, I get a lovely "Permission denied" note. Whoops!

GradGrrrl,

Thanks for your input. I am working very hard to fix things that are broken, and improve things that do not work as well. Part of the problem is that the main site is in a product that I do not have complete control over - that is a nice thing about our community site, as that was built ground up by us.

Basically things on the home page of bgnews.com and everything in Our Views is based on College Publisher/mtvU network structure. We are working hard to get things to work the way we want, sometimes that does not happen right away.

I will take your feedback, like I have taken others, to our contact at mtvU contact. All I can say is that we hear your pain and are working on it with mtvU.

I specifically did not put a "coming soon" page at places such as Campus. And Polopoly just duplicates the home page on other pages that have not been touched yet. This is also on the top of our list, with the carousel and the search functionality.

Making the carousel on the home page a static height is on the top of my to-do list. I will be getting to that this week.

I also found out from Freddy last night that user logins were not set correctly. I checked and they were not, that is my fault completely. I have modified your permissions so you will no longer see "Permission denied" when posting. If you do, please email me at webmaster@bgviews.com, and I will look into it.

We have to go through all user accounts and add the correct privs to all users, but that process will not take long.

Thank you for bringing that to my attention, and posting your thoughts.

Ken

Thanks, Ken - I appreciate the thoughtful response. I haven't tried the search feature again, but the log-in is working much better for me, so that's great. Also, I'm not sure if it's intentional, but I notice that the length of blurbs and images remain fairly static on the main page, so that it doesn't push the content all over the place - this makes a BIG (positive!) difference.

I was wondering if the links to "Opinion" and other sections of the paper will be working anytime soon? It's obviously not something that's super-urgent, but I'm just wondering if the content linked on the main page is all the content that's *in* the edition of the newspaper? For example, under the opinion section on the main page, where three articles are listed - is that really all that's in the paper today? I (and I imagine many other commuters or grad students) like to keep up with the paper, but I can't come in every day to get a paper copy to see what I missed.

Thanks much for the response!

The quick and the short answer to the fact that the sections like "Opinion" have nothing in them is because the new system, CP5, does not populate these automatically, like CP4 did. This is simply too much manual work for the one or two people (students) who put the site online.

However, I am working on a solution for this issue. Been working very hard all summer and hope to have something to show for it come fall semester to address issues such as this one!

Thanks,

Ken