Late Tuesday afternoon a tweet came through from one of my old Carnegie Mellon School of Design professors, B. Uy, which announced that his design studio, Wall to Wall, had just launched a redesign for the CMU School of Drama.

Note: Before I get into my post I want to say that B. Uy and Wall to Wall are extremely talented and they've won numerous design awards for work that they have done for their clients. Definitely check out their work. Also, B. Uy was a fantastic teacher.

To start, the new School of Drama website looks gorgeous. Seriously, kudos to the designers. It really did need a facelift (sorry, but I couldn't find a "Before" shot on the Way Back Machine so you'll have to take my word for it) It has a bold look with lots of strong imagery. Perfect for a website that is looking to attract young college recruits for a very successful, renowned visual program.

But as a developer I have to look under the hood, so to speak, at the source code. I also want to look at URLs and title tags and the order in which content is loaded. So I fired up Firebug and loaded up http://www.drama.cmu.edu Here's what I saw:

• 50 HTTP requests
• 2.3 MB of content pulled down
  The large size is due to the 4 large image files (2000px x 444px) that need to downloaded
• It takes 3.16 seconds to load
• jQuery 1.3.2 is not minified so it's 117.8 KB and the file is being served locally rather via a CDN like Google which is the recommended method for delivering the library
• Not running the latest version of jQuery 1.4.4. The latest, minified version is 26.5 KB
• No META Description which is bad for indexing and SEO
• Declaring HTML Strict yet there are 44 errors on the home page.
  http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.drama.cmu.edu/&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0
  1. You have to close your tags if you want to be HTML Strict
  2. ALT text missing from images
• The CSS suffers from a couple of notable issues (Browser specific errors and warnings should be ignored)
  http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://www.drama.cmu.edu&profile=css21&usermedium=all&warning=1&lang=en
  1. Missing units for widths
• 19 accessibility errors
  http://wave.webaim.org/report?url=http://www.drama.cmu.edu&js=2
  
  1. Most due to missing ALT text

A lot of these issues can be fixed easily. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I suspect that these were not seen as important things to take seriously, but as someone who does this every day it's like finding bad grammar, poor design or terrible kerning.

An interesting thing that struck me was the URL structure which is all based on the number in the URL, likely because it's used to pull in the page information from a database. For example check out http://www.drama.cmu.edu/58/news-and-events The number "58" in the URL is the important part. If you change the "58" to "15" you get a 404 error page (which could use a little design attention of its own) http://www.drama.cmu.edu/15/news-and-events
However, the same page can be pulled up using http://www.drama.cmu.edu/58/foobar The "news-and-event" or "foobar" means nothing which will create a mess in the Google Analytics since you can also get to the same page by going to http://www.drama.cmu.edu/58 At the very least, the server should be set up to do 301 Redirects otherwise Google is going to be indexing A LOT of duplicate pages. Using URL Rewrites they could drop the ID all together and just use URLs like http://www.drama.cmu.edu/news-and-events since the site is running on Apache/2.2.3.

Is everybody perfect? No. There are a few issues with our own site and we run a web development company (although most aren't issues so much as the W3C validator isn't updated for certain META tags and Facebook Connect integration. And the CSS validator doesn't like browser specific declarations although they're perfectly harmless and completely acceptable).

This is what we think about when we develop websites for our clients. It's not just the design but also how it's put together that's important. Structure, design, content, accessibility, optimization: these and many more things are what the whole package of web development is about. Our goal is push web development and to get our clients and others interested in the entire process. After all, if we're not the ones pushing the industry then who will?