Universities

Editions:

Comments

JD

1/12/2007 10:23:25 AM

I am very surprised that Cornell hasn´t featured in this list. IMHO, Cornell has one of the best designed university site.

JD

Skip Knox

1/12/2007 10:24:32 AM

The first thing that strikes me is what strikes me in all such discussions: you´re only looking at the home page, and the home page is one of the least important pages as far as students (current or prospective) are concerned. The only people who care are bosses, alumni, and the local media (who want easy access to news releases from the home page). Oh, and the Marketing folks, of course, because the page usually belongs to them.

Students and faculty (the meat and potatoes of universities), otoh, tend to care about things like the admissions, registration and financial aid sites; the course sites; and a collection of special interest sites, among which would be included the Student Union, individual departments or programs, maybe the student newspaper or a student organization. It´s also worth noting that a great many people hit university sites by way of doing research, landing on specific content pages.

In my own experience, almost *no one* pays attention to site design down at those levels, preferring to leave them to the individual departments responsible. Regardless of how the home page looks, how the university looks (and works) at those lower levels is what matters.

Patrick

1/12/2007 10:40:18 AM

JD, indeed Cornell is a nice looking site, I added it to the list for updates, but I just can´t get every university! I have a job :)

Skip, Of course there is more to these sites then the landing page. Which as you mentioned is really just a portal to the countless sub sites. I worked for two departments of a large university and I am more then aware of how sub sites differ greatly from the main one. I could do an entire article on all the variations within a single university. I worked at Wash U. in st louis for 3 years and I was still discovering new sites we had.

At the same time, some universities do a great job of presenting a unified image across most if not all sections. This is tough of course. but sometime to consider.

My goal isn´t to entirely sum up the industry, just to provide links to some great looking samples in the hopes of inspiring people to see what others have done!

Joe Engle

1/12/2007 10:40:40 AM

There are two more schools that I find to have really good sites.

The first is University of Baltimore (http://www.ubalt.edu). It´s surely watered down, but so very easy to navigate.

The other is Maryland Institute College of Art. I mean, it´s an art school, so there´s a lot more freedom allowed... But I´d love to see the site´s initial design, before it was watered down by decision makers.

Mato

1/12/2007 10:42:10 AM

Just like JD I was surprised not to see in you list the Cornell web site. Instead of that, I saw the Boston College site.. and let me tell you JD.. It´s basically the same structure.

Great Site! Congratulations! I´m a regular visitor of Design Meltdown from Chile!

Michael

1/12/2007 1:18:59 PM

I have to also chime in with my love for Cornell´s site. It has been one of my favorites for some time (even though ours is one of the ones with a screenshot above).

Beautiful design, standards compliant, fast-loading, clear navigation, elegant without being flashy, and those banner images just "pop."

Chris Bruzer

1/12/2007 2:57:04 PM

As a university web site administrator, I have experienced first hand the frustration of design by committee, and our site suffers for it. On the other hand, a university web site must serve multiple and diverse audiences, and design by committee may be the only way to adequately represent divergent and often contrasting views.

I believe the author makes the same two mistakes about university website design that many people make; that the primary function of the web site is for marketing, and that visual appeal is the primary measure of quality. Few people come to a university web site primarily for the marketing message, and when marketing gets in the way of information access, user satisfaction suffers.

No matter how beautifully the restaurant is decorated, if the service is poor and the food tastes terrible, the customer wont be back.

Patrick

1/12/2007 2:59:13 PM

Chris, an excellent point for sure. I suppose I was just considering the aspect of the site which is intended to enlist new students. Certainly that has a major marketing aspect to it. But many if not most of the individual sub sites serve rather different purposes.

I just know the frustration of having a wonderful design rejected for arbitrary reasons. It sucked the life out of it for me.

Chris

1/13/2007 9:01:58 AM

As a web master at small liberal arts college in NY I really appreciate you compiling the list of sites. I think the BU site that incorporated the short student interview on audio with a scrolling pictures was quite captivating.

Amy Stephen

1/13/2007 11:52:58 AM

"Having previously worked at a university where I maintained multiple web sites I have a few thoughts on the topic. And now that they can´t fire me, I guess I can say what I want! Not that I have anything particularly bad to say. From my experience, the single biggest hurdle for the web designer and developer at a university is death by committee."

Sa-weet! lol I work at a University as well. I am a regular visitor of your remarkable site. Keep up the great work lifting up what is good.

Felix

1/14/2007 8:48:04 AM

Hey guys, you need to check out: http://en.fh-muenster.de/
It´s less focused on the use of images. They focus more on presenting information and a strong usability.

Sardionerak

1/17/2007 8:08:45 AM

Hello, I completely understand your frustration with committees. However, my perception of this has changed since I started to use those committee meetings as a management buy-in. I think they are a great place to manage user expectations, and even educate all the people that want to be involved but have no clue about web design. Many of my colleagues would not touch committees with a stick, but personally, I have learned to use them to make all the committee members more aware of web site concerns, of the content they need to deliver, and of the effects that this will have for both their processes and the user streams.
Therefore, although they can be a pain, designing without committees can really break your neck when you reveal your kick-butt design but others don´t have any feeling of ownership.
Thank you for compiling all these web sites, I will certainly sift through them.

Nancy

2/8/2007 9:46:20 AM

Our president has created a web site task force to look into all issues of web services, from restructuring to servers to budget, etc. Currently our web services is housed in our library and they handle a wide variety of services including student web pages, programming for internal purposes,etc. They have two full time employees for our university (enrollment 9,500) and a $6,000 per year budget. I would like more control of the main pages for marketing purposes, but don´t want all the responsiblities of everything that they do. Is there a way to make this happen amicably as well as funtionally?

Nancy

2/8/2007 10:13:17 AM

Do you match your web site design to your publications?

Stewart Foss

2/8/2007 5:41:40 PM

Great discussion and awesome examples. Related to this, I just launched a higher-ed web design gallery a few weeks ago, the site may be of interest to those visiting this article:
http://www.eduStyle.net

Lauren

2/21/2007 4:41:50 PM

So great to see a nice collection of university sites. I´ve worked with universities from time to time, as well as other large bureaucratic organizations, and they present huge design challenges. My two favourites are NYU (http://www.nyu.edu/) and Seattle University (http://www.seattleu.edu/) -- I think they both do a remarkable job of balancing the schools´ need to have almost everything linked directly from the home page, and visitors´ need for clarity & simplicity. I also think they succeed well at carrying the site branding through various sub-sections, despite widely diverse content.

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2/26/2007 8:45:06 AM

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