WebJunction

What do you think of the new site? What can we do to make it better?

Your feedback will help us identify how things are going on the new platform and help us find and prioritize any bugs in the new system. We'll collect any suggestions you may have about how to make improvements for WebJunction members in the future.

As always, WebJunction is a work in progress and we depend on your input to guide our overall development.

You're also welcome to contact us with your feedback.

If you have ideas for the next phase of the new site, be sure to post those in the Site Feature Request Group.

Many thanks for being a part of the WebJunction community. We look forward to hearing from you!

Heck, yeah, that should be there! Sometimes you get strange lists when a developer refers to a graphic design "lorem ipsum" wireframe! With our next install, the drop-down should change to the list below - what do you think??? :

Hi Bill - I saw your tweet as well on the broken friend email links. We're looking into that right now to see what the deal is, thanks for flagging that. On things like interaction with outside social network API's and more/better social tools overall, those are all on the site wish list - we'd love to do them at some later point, but we had to prioritize what we felt would be the core of a good experience for this particular launch.

Great feedback though, most of us are passionate users of a LOT of social networking tools, so we're always looking for ways to make the experience better.

I've been looking around the new Webjunction for about an hour an a half now and have found it a frustrating experience. (I am NOT a novice with web applications, BTW.)

I logged in to webjunction.org, watched the intro video, and edited my profile. Then I started exploring.

First reaction: Pages took a long time to load (typically 5 to 10 seconds on DSL). Also on many pages I had to scroll sideways to see all the content.

Clicked around....got a feel for what was where. Continued to get sluggish page loads.

Then I looked at the course offerings. Saw that the one I wanted was $40. So I thought if I logged in to my affiliate site (me.webjunction.org) I would see a lower price. Not sure why I had to log in to my affiliate site AND the main site. I don't recall having to do that on the old webjunction. At any rate, once I logged in I saw that the course is free through the Maine State Library. Sweet. So I add it to my cart, and then try to check out. No go. Error message says:

"You have entered invalid data. Please try again. You do not have enough "credit" to make this purchase, either remove some of the items in your cart, contact your administrator or the WJ Support Center."

The price was showing as $0.00 - is this a shopping cart problem, or an affiliation problem?

So I give up on that. Start exploring some more. In the process I am taken away from me.webjunction.org to plain webjunction.org and see that I have to log in again. (I have my browser set to accept all cookies...why am I having to log in again?)

Clicked around some more, read some discussions. Found this feedback thread.

In summary, my initial visit included:
- very sluggish page loads
- many pages required sideways scrolling to see everything
- shopping cart did not work
- had to log in to separately to the main site and to my affiliated site (Maine)

Site performance and usability of features did not meet my expectations.

when I display a profile page all of the links in the blue tool bar disappear. to get back to the main page, I have to click on the logo or just now found that the link that say's whose profile it is will also do that.

another thing, need a new post link at the top of the forum pages. now have to scroll all the way to the bottom.:

Hi Robert,
Thank you for taking the time to provide us with feedback about the new WebJunction site. We are still fine tuning the performance, so please bear with us. We are also working on the issue around needing to log into the WJ Central site and our partner sites separately.

I am checking into your question around the sideways scrolling and will ask one of my colleagues to post more information about this issue shortly.

The problems you experienced trying to add a course to your shopping cart on the Maine partner site may have been because you are not yet affiliated with the Maine site. To affiliate, you will need to go to the My Account portlet and click on edit account. Next click on the affiliations tab, check the Maine box, and save your changes. You will receive an email from Maine WebJunction indicating your affiliation has been approved. At that point you will be able to access the courses for free. If you continue to experience problems after your affiliation has been approved PLEASE let us know!

Bob, thanks for raising this issue. The new WJ site does perform better on Firefox and IE 7.0 than on IE 6.0. I will share your feedback with our support team.

Regards,

I use 1024x768 screen resolution, but I also have enlarged my default browser fonts so that websites are easier for me to read. I spend a lot of time on the computer each day (between work and home) and I find I need to enlarge the fonts for readability and to avoid eye strain. (The lesson is, I think: don't get older!)

Maybe that is what is causing me to have to scroll horizontally on many of webjunction's pages. But I would have thought your designers would have built in a "fluid" layout to accommodate accessibility. In my own website designs I try to allow for any screen resolution and enlarged fonts, because you can't assume what hardware or viewing preferences your visitors my have.

Laura, I believe I am affiliated with the Maine webjunction. I know I was on the old webjunction, and it is "checked" on my list of affiliates. Also, I was able to login and got the reduced price for the class. Do I have to "re-affiliate" with Maine on the new webjunction?

BTW, I tried checking out my shopping cart again today. This time I got a different error message:
"webjunction.org uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is only valid for *.webjunction.org
(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)"

Hi Robert,

I am with you on the readability issue: I'm very myopic and prefer the larger font size as well. We increased the base font from that of the old site to 12 pt, and made the fonts relative so that members can use the browser resizing like you are doing. I think the sticking point of trying for a fully liquid layout is that certain portlets (such as the discussions) would end up being squished beyond recognition. 3-column liquid layouts are bit a tricky with our "portlet"-based layout (so I'm told, I'm not the designer), so we went with a semi-liquid layout instead. However, we have the goal of continuing to strive for being a completely Section 508-compatible site, so we will continue to fine-tune the CSS to meet those goals.
(I'll let other folks respond to your follow-ups on course purchasing and affiliiation)

Sharon

Robert - Thanks so much for trying again and letting us know. We are tracking the bug and know what needs to happen to get it fixed. And obviously this is an issue we will get fixed as soon as we can.

Dale