As far as the site as a whole body—it looks great! The aesthetics of the site seem to really work with Shenandoah in print form and, in general, the site is really easy to navigate. Having the content posted fleshes out the site well, and the more that is published the better I can judge the navigability of the site. Below is a list of items that still need correcting/improvement that I have found with my most recent scan of the site.
The “Welcome to Shenandoah” red box takes up too much visual space for such a plain object on the homepage, it almost causes the viewer to skip over the Dunlap art upon first seeing the site
Would it be possible to make the “Current Issue” title on the left hand column a link to the actual Current Issue?
I’ve been viewing the site in Safari and Internet Explorer, so this might be a problem with different browsers, but the text alignment in the gray boxes on the right side is an awkward distance from the titles.Just overall, browser compatability would be a good area to focus on..
The “Next Quotation” link is not working yet
In the issue it might be helpful to make the titles of the work bigger once you get to the work itself. The orange box with the author information overwhelms the title.
Is there a way to include the titles of the Dunlap art below each piece while viewing them as a slideshow or as individual works?
On the “Recommended Reading” tab, I think it would look better to list the titles of each work that is recommended. On the page itself, it would be useful to have same page tab links as each of the work’s titles so a person can jump to the recommendation if a particular title looks interesting.
On the “Credits” page the positive comments kind of get lost on the bottom of the page. Maybe we could make a heading underneath the line that separates the page that introduces the positive reviews? But if we want to continue the idea of running them along the bottom of each page of the “About” section, this could look awkward. In either case, I think the red color of the comments on the “credits” page seems out of place.
Is there going to be content on the “About” homepage or the “Intern” homepage sections? If not, clicking on “about” and “internships” should not lead to another page.
The spacing of the “English 453” page is too spread apart.
This is probably more of a call for what Mr. Smith wants to share but it might be useful to include on the “contact” page a phone number and an actual mailing address? This might not be necessary if Shenandoah starts only accepting email submissions, but it could be a quick and useful way for potential submitters to find the address until we reach that point.
Those are the comments I have for now! The site really is making some great progress.
Tracy Richardson is the editor of Washington and Lee’s student literary magazine Muse and is currently Assistant editor of Shenandoah.