Response to website feedback

Posted on Nov 02 by mdreyfus.

Dear CTK Community,

Since the changeover to the new website, I've received a lot of helpful and interesting comments on the Feedback Form. The community has been great at helping me track down bugs and respond to your needs. Here, I thought I'd take a moment to respond to some of the questions, comments, and criticisms that have come in.

What's this Login stuff? Can I log in?

The login links go to our school Google Apps services. This is one easy way for students and staff to get to their email and online documents. Parents can also log in using the username and password distributed by the room parent coordinators, to see certain protected information, like documents, contact information, and videos.

It's not as colorful as the old site

I can't disagree there, but my personal feeling is that this site is a bit less busy-looking.

The site uses the wrong colors

A few people have commented that the site should use the school colors. It turns out that it does! Red and Gold are the school colors, and have been for as long as our most senior staff members can remember. These are the colors of the CYO sports teams, and I was instructed that those were to be the colors used on the site.

So if those are the colors, why are the uniforms blue and green? And the school logo? Got me. Feel free to send in a new logo design using Red and Gold!

Where's the home button?

To go to the home page, just click the Christ The King School icon. This is a convention used on lots of websites to avoid cluttering up the menu.

The shareable Google Calendar is great!

Thanks, I think so too! I use Google Calendars for everything, from my class schedules to little reminders. If you have a Google Account, it's easy to add the school's calendar to your own. The best part about that is you'll see any changes we make instantly! And if you happen to have a smartphone, you can keep up to date with the school calendar from anywhere.

If you still like to print out a paper calendar, you can find it in the Family Envelope. As per a recent request, I've added a download link to it on the Calendar page.

The home page slideshow is too short and too focused on 8th Graders

I tend to agree with this statement. The problem is that any slideshow comes with limitations, mainly in size and aspect ratio. Using any slideshow design means using only one size and shape of picture, otherwise the web page around the show is constantly changing. On top of that, there were photos that could not be used because they showed people who had not provided consent for using their image. There were lots of great pictures of younger students, staff, and parents, that just didn't work out! Here's why:

If you look at the slideshow, you'll notice that it's a very wide frame; the pictures are 2 and 3/4 times as wide as they are tall. This means that any photo chosen first should be wide (rather than tall), and second needs to still look great when fit into that extra wide frame of the slideshow. Unfortunately, this made it impossible to use dozens of really great pictures that I found in the archives on the slideshow.

Another important point here is image size. Looking through the photos I had access to, many of them were small size images, and would have needed stretching to fit into the slideshow. This is especially true of the images sent in to the photos email. It's a shame because they were beautiful pictures! If you'd like to submit something, be sure your photo file is at least 1MB in size. Even most cell phone cameras today can do this, as long as you don't change a setting to lower quality.

The final point I'll make here is a personal, rather than technical one. The two big shutterbugs of the school are Ms. McMillan and Mrs. Bailey; both middle school teachers. Since most of the pictures in the archive come from them, there just tend to be more photos of the upper grades. But they've been hard at work this year, so hopefully we'll be able to add some news shots soon.

I'm going to start working on an image gallery, which will accept pictures of all sizes and shapes. That way, even though they might not fit into the home slideshow, we can start sharing some of the other beautiful pictures taken in and around the school!

Christ the King School