University Design
First, let me offer the standard disclaimer. This clearly isn’t a design site, and I’m not claiming to know enough about design to offer an educated opinion. I’m just tossing out a few thoughts, and you can either agree that they are valid points, or just ignore them and go back to thinking that I’m an idiot.
With that said, I sometimes think about the process involved with web design, and how designers choose to deal with (or completely ignore) the factors that affect initial user impression.
It seems that certain categories of websites, like those for colleges and universities, have much more to gain or lose by the initial user impression. After all, schools are selling their staff, campus, lifestyle, and quality of education to potential applicants. Outside of business or portfolio sites, there probably isn’t another type of site where user impression is as important.
What I’ve found is that many school sites are not terribly attractive or well designed. I’m not talking about the code, or a crime against web standards, only the judgments I make about the school as soon as the page loads. Strangely, the worst offenders appear to be larger schools with significant budgets, whereas the most memorable and attractive sites are often for schools that I have never heard of.
A few questions immediately occur to me. Is a badly designed site representative of the quality of the education? Probably not. Does the school believe that the site is well designed and attractive? Does the design of an official site factor into the applicant decision making process? Maybe not. But, if you were in the process of evaluating which school to attend, and you had to make a decision that was based on what you could learn from their website, wouldn’t the feeling you had for the school be affected by their site design?
I’m not suggesting that impressions about an institution based on site design are on equal footing with the content of the pages, but if you were shopping for a new car, and they all had similar engines, comparable fuel efficiency, and each sold for the same price, would you be more inclined to select one that had the latest design, features and options, or one that was outdated, built like a box, and beat to hell?
Moderation: The older posts on Second Negative are protected by a comment moderation queue. If you leave a comment I'll need to manually approve it, but after that it will be published above. So comment away.
