O-Week (dot rice dot edu), we hardly knew ye
Well, the website for Rice’s undergraduate orientation week has finally undergone a total redesign (probably a result of a new upper echelon at the university, including a new Dean of Undergraduates). Verdict: blah.
The front page is slick and impersonal, and the undergraduate information is buried under a haystack of JavaScript menus. Not particularly engaging. The copy is new, too:
The mission of O-Week is to assist new students in the transition to academic and social life at Rice University, with the two primary functions being: to provide academic advising and to introduce and incorporate new students into their residential colleges. Informative presentations, small-group discussions, academic advising, and class registration are designed to help you enter the university informed and confident about your upcoming years at Rice.
YAWN. Sorry for the snoozer, Class of 2010.
Of course, I’m partial to the version I designed for O*Week 1998, whose design (roughly) and text (exactly) survived two redesigns and seven years.
WHAT WAS I THINKING?
These people are all dressed the same, and they know who I am, and they’re telling me I’m going to be LIVING in their building!
These people are crazy! Get me out of here!
WHOA, THERENow calm down. These people have been planning for months, and they’ve been working without sleep for days, doing nothing but preparing for your arrival.
Okay, maybe that doesn’t really vouch for their sanity.
But these are your advisors — a team of several older Rice students who have sworn to spare you from the dull sort of orientation you would have been subjected to at another school. You simply can’t adjust to an intense new atmosphere by sitting in 2,000-seat lecture halls with people you may never see again, listening to boring lectures by faculty you’ll never meet.
To put it another way (taken from the Will Rice College 1998 O-Week book): “You may be nervous, sweaty, and even scared, but we guarantee that you will remember your O-Week.”
OK, are you with me now? Good.
Welcome to O-Week.
I was always pretty proud of that legacy, and it’s sad to see it go. Oh, well; times change, and websites move on.
[On the other hand, the photos that they're using on the new O-Week website do appear to be from the late 90s…]
Update: What, no information for transfer students on the new site?
Update 2: Yeah, yeah, the new site has all kinds of handy information that the 1998 version lacked. (This is partially because in eight years a lot has been done to put handy university information online.) So I guess I give the new site points for being somewhat more useful than previous versions. But it’s definitely not as much fun.
5 Responses to “O-Week (dot rice dot edu), we hardly knew ye”
I thought you were being ironic when I clicked on the “handy information” link. That’s because that linked page, when viewed in Firefox or IE7 (beta 3) on my computer, appears to have no links. Only when you mouse over the headers does the black text with no underlining become underlined (though still black), revealing itself to be a link. So there are helpful links … if you know where to find them in the text!
Actually, link coloring is a problem all over the site in my browsers. This appears to be due to some really hideous HTML auto-mangling:
<font><font face=”Helvetica”><font size=”4″><font><font>We have provided some useful information about what is available at Rice for your student at
</font></font></font></font> <a href=”http://students.rice.edu/students/Parents.asp”><font face=”Helvetica” size=”4″>http://students.rice.edu/students/Parents.asp
</font></a><font face=”Helvetica” size=”4″>.
Apparently, in Firefox, this overrides the little that they tried to do with CSS. Not to mention how stupid it looks as markup. And naked URLs as a link … bleah.
But enough of my webmaster talk. Yes, Rice continues its tradition* of abusing stock photos. At least four people in the “Undergraduates” image on the main O-Week page were contemporaries of mine, and I matriculated in ‘93. And of the few other photos of people on that site, I recognize several more folks.
Gah … the more I look around the O-Week site, the sadder I get. (Families FAQS: “Coming soon!” Families schedule: What day is it? What to bring: lots of ❑ that Firefox doesn’t deal with, and several blank lines!) It’s clearly a step backwards from your site/copy/design.
So instead I’ll fulfill my asterisk. *When I was a freshman, there was a drum circle around Willy’s statue. As I was a drummer, and perhaps unaware of any hippie overtones at the time, I went because, hey, college experience. Someone from the Thresher took a photo of that circle (thankfully, my back was to the camera, in a TMBG shirt, no less). That photo appeared in countless bits of official Rice output — yearbooks, application packets, various mailings, and the screensaver on Fondren computers. I myself was embarrassed by it, but someone in the publicity department was in love with that photo. Gah.
I can never leave short comments.
comment posted at 12:24 pm on 21 Aug 2006
And here I thought this wouldn’t engender any useful discussion at all, because the comments feature on dsandler.org is lightly used. (Contributing factors: (1) I didn’t allow comments until recently; (2) the comment-reading experience in WordPress pales in comparison to other systems which are better about fostering conversation threads (e.g. the system LiveJournal has had for years).
I didn’t really even get into technical issues in my original critique (except for my jab at the DHTML menus). But you’re right, the invisible links are atrocious. I guess I just scrubbed the page with my mouse (Myst instincts?) without realizing it. Bad web design trains us all to be sleuths, I guess.
comment posted at 1:02 pm on 21 Aug 2006
That is a shame. The new site loses distinctive Rice-flavor.
The revised mission-of-O-week statement has definitely been big this year. A significant number of co-advisor interviews had questions about “how you would promote this mission statement and make sure your freshmen got enough advising” and a question about “do you think O-week should be more a serious time or fun?”. I was rather surprised that this was even a question…but maybe my argument in favor of fun was partly why I wasn’t selected there.
I think it comes with the increased concerns (albeit unfounded) from higher-ups about hazing. Regardless, now that the kiddos are here, the spirit of the advisors will be what really colors O-week.
Todd: Opera is not happy with the “Handy information” links either. What browser are they designing for? I haven’t tried IE 6. *shudder*
comment posted at 5:39 pm on 21 Aug 2006
now here’s a flashback:
“All photographs were taken on-location by the author using an Apple QuickTake 150″
comment posted at 4:44 am on 25 Aug 2006
Yeah, I loaned the camera from someone … probably someone in IT. It was huge, it took photos at 640×480, and it was still totally awesome. It became immediately apparent to me, after wandering around campus with the thing, how digital photography (in particular, “free” photos) would change the way people took pictures.
comment posted at 7:04 am on 25 Aug 2006