White space on the home page
9/20/06: Fixed (for now, anyway)
Severity: minor
Audience: as large as possible
Fiscal effect: maybe (general impression of organization)
Policy question: no
Reported: yes (just now to Betty)
Link: www.aauw.org
Once upon a time, www.aauw.org had a fairly tight (if busy) layout. There was a small “search” in the upper left. It was about the same size as the “member center” button that is near the search form now.
In the fall of 2005, the “old” search was replaced with one “powered by Google”. [The old search, a ColdFusion plugin of some sort, hadn’t been working for months.] The new search (that worked!) was, of course, an improvement, but the Google search form was larger than the old one and that threw off the layout of the home page.
There’s evidently been a standard “make the home page graphic this size (c. 347×378?)” that’s been in effect since the last redesign (2003?). But with the larger search form (and correspondingly taller left column) this graphic is significantly smaller than the table cell allotted for it in the middle of the page.
This, I think, makes the whole page look unbalanced. Given that we’re using a fixed rather than floating design (and one that was initially greeted with “it’s too small!”), it would seem that we could fit the pieces together a bit better. There are also ways to deemphasize the Google search box (smaller logo, etc.).