Football is here, no thanks to gopack.com

Football season is finally here, thank God. My husband can stop itching in front of the TV bored off his patootie watching me watch my recordings of The Closer and Saving Grace and Generation Kill, and Man TV can take over and all will be back to normal in the Tackabery household. It’s been a depressing summer to be a Wolfpack fan, even after a pretty exciting finale to baseball season. With basketball season ending with a whimper … that was me, whining as I slinked out of my seat wondering what the hell happened to our team that had so much promise (planning a tell all book at some point, Brandon?) … and injury report after injury report after injury report from the football team, and one more week of Lee Fowler facility reports on his weekly TV show, I was starting to think I should just bite the bullet and buy a Red Sox hat and some Chicago Cubs jerseys for good measure. Because NC State is starting to look like the athletics program that can’t.

But! I refuse to bow to negativity, even if the so-called re-design of the gopack.com home page makes my blood boil over past healthy levels. On his show, Tony Haynes and Fowler made a point of explaining to us that the re-design of gopack.com took six months, and the team was up all hours to make a 4 a.m. launch deadline.

Thanks, Lee. I’ve been developing web sites for over seven years, and let me tell you, there is no web site that is so important that it needs to roll out a new look at four in the morning. And we don’t care how long it took you to build it. Nobody cares how many hours you spent on it. But, they will make you live to regret every singly hour you brag about when they point out EVERY. SINGLE. FLAW. on that web site you took so much bloody time, using what I can only imagine is OUR Wolfpack Club donations, not to mention state tax money and NCAA winnings, to put out a product that is flawed at the very, very best of it.

So please don’t take this as negative, Mr. Fowler, when I point out that the Home Page of gopack.com is completely unusable. But Mr. Horning should take it as negative as I can make it. The only thing that WORKS on gopack.com is the RSS feeds - but this is actually a huge step for them, because RSS was the thing they were NOT doing before. 

What’s obvious to me, looking at gopack.com - admitting that I am looking at this site from a professional bias I will not apologize for (sorry) - is that the site was put together by a video broadcaster, not an interactive marketing company. Because the web site does not meet web site usability guidelines for clickable content, images that are sized uniformly, uniform fonts, colors that don’t make your eyes bleed, readable content, and did I say CLICKABLE content?

My issue is not with readable interior pages such as the story about Coach Lowe’s upcoming trip to Toronto with the basketball team. Here the page is readable, with adequate white space and uniform fonts. I can even forgive the fact that the Meet the Team box at the bottom of the page is sized too short to fit the rest of the page (CSS that matches all the way down fellas). Having subscribed to the News RSS means I won’t have to look at the monstrosity that is the leader pages that get me to pages like this, which will save me rising blood pressure and, hopefully, extra trips to the cardiologist, Mr. Horning. Because sub-category or lower parent pages (one for each sport, is what I’m talking about, or, if you’d rather, the individual sport sections of the web site) like this are completely awful. 

Sin #1: All navigation should work exactly the same way so visitors can be confident in how a web site works and not get lost. However, gopack.com has completely different navigation schemes on the same page. We have straight hover and click links on the very top (not all of which are active - shame on you! If they don’t work why are they there? Don’t show anything that’s not live, evil bastards, people will think you’re lying to them and lose confidence in the site, especially the longer that inactive link sits there. And sits there. and sits there. But I digress). The second navigation bar contains a hover navigation that displays a third rollover menu below it in black letters, in which active links change color to red. Great nav. Why didn’t you use it every where else? Was it broken? Oh no. I know what happened. You had widgets built for other web sites and you just moved them over and dumped them on us, didn’t you JumpTV? Lazy is the path to hell. Tsk tsk. There is a different nav in the More News window - we’ve switched from horizontal to vertical, and all the icons look the same, so there is no way to tell the difference between links. Quickly followed by a bunch of red boxes that are so jumbled and OH, RED, so we can’t read them, so they all flow together and look alike. Then a different nav scheme on the bottom - hover links, in a different font, that don’t change color when you hover on them, so you don’t know if they work until you click.

The combined weight of this navigation menu sin is so great, the web site committee should be wrapped in chains and placed at the bottom of the ocean.

Sin #2: (a direct result of Sin #1) Scrollbars are evil and must be destroyed. In fact, every time someone puts a scrollbar on a new web page, God kills a kitten. This has been documented. There is absolutely no good point to that scrollbar in the More News window. Put just enough links to fit in the box and include a Read More link on the bottom. In the words of Forrest Gump, that’s all I have to say about that.

Sin #3: The use of God almighty red. It’s the Red and White from State. Is there something wrong with White? Are we afraid of it? Who gives a flying s%$t if every other school in the universe only uses their school colors on their website, RED is hard to read. Black on white is easy to read. Give us a break. I know it’s red. That doesn’t mean you have to drench every box in red. Because red next to red with red letters on top of red next to a red border in a red box next to dark red with light red adds up to NO ONE CAN DISTINGUISH BETWEEN THE BOXES.

Sin #4. It’s a big browser world out there, baby. Lots of us use big monitors and can handle something a bit bigger than an 800 width web site. A CSS that widens that puppy depending upon the width of your browser would make the web site READABLE. Can I get a hallelujah? And for God’s sake - background wallpaper is so 1996. Can we enter this century, please? Nobody likes that darned logo you made, so let’s get rid of the wallpaper too while we are at it. One little instance of it on the home page might be acceptable, because we can ignore it most of the time. But that … wallpaper! what is this, a geocities site? … makes me gag. Can we by-god not just look like a Top 25 Athletic program, but also look like a TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY THAT GRADUATES PROFESSIONALS IN THIS FIELD? Like me, for instance?

Sin #5: Sites should include standard navigation and behavior. Pictures should be clickable, text should be clickable, etc. The Latest News section on the Home Page drives me absolutely batf^&k crazy, because every time I go there I expect it to do something it doesn’t do.

That would be? Why, work, Alex! It has these little pictures, red text, and a little introduction to the article on it. So why can’t I click on it? Oh, it does something after I hover here? But how long? I can’t tell. I think it just changes on it’s own, Alex, no matter what I do. But wait! It’s my friggin’ browser, my web site visit, I want to see what I came for Alex. Who cares about you, visitor? NOT GOPACK.COM, that’s who.

Sin #6: Images should be uniform sizes. If it doesn’t fit, re-size that puppy. I hate pictures that are lined up on a horizontal axis, but all have different widths and don’t line up on the bottom axis as well. Because, well, I possess a sense of aesthetics, and I’d like my web site to look like professionals are in charge. But, like my husband says, I should know better. Apparently, as a Wolfpack fan, I should expect mediocrity, even though I pay for professionalism.

Okay, rant concluded. I feel better. But I still hate that website. I’m off to order a Sox hat now — hopefully from a usable web site.