Introduction
So maybe you got here and asked yourself, why in the world did they do all this work on the website? Well, as your friendly neighborhood webmaster, I'll do my best to explain.
Once upon a time, I came to Tekko with the responsibility of managing content on the website. The editing tool we used at the time was plagued by glitches that would cause the page to randomly reload before we were finished, content shared between pages would permanently disappear for what seemed like no reason, many pieces were duplicated in a way that forced us to make the same change on every page over and over, and the list goes on. The website was also impossibly slow, causing excessive wait times for not only our users, but our own web team too. Needless to say, that system made content updates very painful.
As a professional web developer, I understood these problems and how to fix them. I also understood that taking on a project of this size was going to be a huge commitment that I wouldn't get paid for, and I would be making myself vulnerable to thousands of critical eyes.
So why did I do it?
Well, from a selfish perspective, designing and architecting a website like this provided an opportunity to work with the technologies I'm most excited about, giving me valuable experience to add to my resume. Besides that, I'm just super passionate about anime and this community, so I wanted to make a positive impact somehow! Finally, being in charge of website content, it makes my job a lot more pleasant, and my fellow web team members are pretty relieved too.
So I brought in a couple more volunteers from my network to help me develop this beast from scratch, and we're proud of the overall result.
Recently Resolved Issues
Fortunately, we haven't been facing many major issues in the recent past. That said, we did notice a few issue reports coming in here and there. Read below to see what we fixed!
Overlapping Notice
Previously, the notice at the top of the page was overlapping a lot of content. We've since added a feature to collapse the full notice by default with a "show full notice" prompt. We also moved some items down to compensate for the extra space, but this is a bandaid for the real issue, which is the fact that the notice does not create its own space at the top of the page. We can fix this, but it may require a more thorough restructuring. For now, though, everything should look decent on most devices.
Slow animation
We've gotten a number of feedback forms about the site being slow. Although we can certainly improve the loading times by shrinking and compressing our images, we haven't noticed excessive wait times compared to the old website. However, I wonder if the slow loading animation was creating the illusion of a slower website. SO, I went ahead and sped it up by ~230%, and while I was there I also slightly sped up all the animations universally.
The "more" button was not noticeable
Some people are reporting that it's sometimes difficult to find information when the content is collapsed under the "more" button in the top right, because it wasn't very noticeable. This is a completely valid UX criticism, and we welcome more of it!
I tried to follow best practices by replacing the transparent background with a bright gradient and bold contrasting text. This gives it more of the appearance of a clickable button.
Everything is an ever-evolving work-in-progress, so it may not be perfect yet. Let us know what you think by submitting your feedback at the footer of any page!
404 errors when navigating from News pages
We've been seeing issue reports about 404 errors coming in, but it took us a bit to figure out how our users were encountering the issue. As it turns out, it only happened if you navigated anywhere from the News pages. All the links in the menu changed from, for example, "/registration" to "/news/registration", which obviously doesn't exist. A little tweak and a push, and now this issue should be resolved!
Outstanding Issues
As much as I'd like to lie and say that experienced developers never encounter issues, I can't even say that with a straight face. In all my years, I've never seen a project completely free of some little bugs here and there, especially if a new feature was recently added.
If you notice an issue that isn't listed here, please let us know by using the button at the very bottom of the page!
The images take a few seconds to load on a fast connection
I'll admit, this is because I was in a hurry, and I didn't get a chance to optimize all the images for the web yet. Don't worry, this is right here on this to-do list, but I'm going to wait for our dev team to finish an image-related feature that only our content editors will see.
Feedback
We're listening! But truth-be-told, sometimes we get conflicting advice and we aren't sure which way to go. That's why we're going to take your anonymous feedback and make it into community polls that we'll use to determine what the majority of our users want to see. Submit your feedback by using the button at the bottom of the page!
If you have any further questions or you would like a reply from us, please feel free to email us at webteam@pittjcs.org . If you have any questions about Tekko in general, including events, badge purchases, volunteering, etc, please email the appropriate department from our contact page . The website department is not responsible for running all of Tekko, as much as we'd love to take the credit. ;)