audendi

Looks like Hillsdale College, after some seven years roughly, has finally redesigned their website. It looks good! If it had been designed seven years ago, that is.

Yep, it looks great! All the content has been reorganized with a new interface and what looks like a new(er) backend - at closer inspection it looks like they are running the same ASP based content management system. In any event, that’s fine. I mean, if they want to use IIS, that’s their problem. The website does at least look a little better than the old iteration. Unfortunately, the change will probably jar a lot of longtime users who are accustomed to the old design. Perhaps it could have been a little more evolutionary, but it’s too late for that.

Of course, the real clusterfuck about this whole situation is that since they reconfigured all the content and changed all the pages URLs, Google searches of Hillsdale’s website are essentially worthless. To access any content you have to use the Google Cache. For example, a search of hillsdale.edu for the term ‘Shakespeare’ yields plenty of results. Try clicking any of the top three results. That’s right, 404 error, page not found. They even moved some parts of the old website entirely to a new URL, for example, the Collegian Newspaper’s website is now at hillsdalesites.org. People, like say, alumni who donate money and read the newspaper to keep up with things at the college, and who have bookmarked a simple url, hillsdale.edu/collegian, will now be met with an entirely unhelpful 404 error. I cannot emphasize enough how bad this is. It is bad design practice. Linkrot should really be unacceptable for such an organization, especially if their content management backend has not actually changed.

Many people rely on search as their primary means of navigating the web, and now a 404 page is the result of clicking just about any google result for the time being. This will probably settle out as google reindexes the website, but it will take a while, and there will still be lots of dead links. They could have provided a custom 404 error without too much work to help ameliorate this transition period. Perhaps this redesign was necessary, and the scorched earth policy of redesign just had to be done, but I’m skeptical.

Oh well, maybe they moved the Collegian to a different URL so that nobody can find any antiwar sentiments on hillsdale.edu.

UPDATE: As Joe has noted in the comments, some URLs now redirect to their proper location. For example, hillsdale.edu/collegian redirects to the new Collegian website. Of course, any URL that is hillsdale.edu/collegian/article/example just redirects to the Collegian main page. An improvement, at least.

Also, they have issued a Custom 404 error page! This is definitely an improvement from an information and usability standpoint. I wrote this post on July 3. Now, 5 days later, it appears someone has fixed a few of the things I griped about. Maybe someone from Hillsdale College is reading this blog.