Ian: I see what you mean about the Samford site design. That strange green background makes the site difficult to look at. Why would they create a school site without the school colors? Feedback is definitely the key to developing something appropriate for the user base.

It just seems that the people in charge of these sites have a fundamental misunderstanding of the web and the effect official sites have on perception. Thanks for the comments, and the kind words.

I’ve been meaning to make a post like this myself. I attend Samford Unviersity and for the past 2 years they’ve had a relatively good looking site–save some very poor uses of javascript for menus. Over the past 3 months, however they’ve moved to what they call a very ’simplistic’ design that is supposed to be more user friendy and to help w/ our Branding campaign.

What I find interesting is that the current students HATE it…its ugly, it doesn’t represent our school colors (blue and red) and it looks like someone in a first semester Web Design class made it in Hot Dog Pro in about 30 minutes…I mean, heck…put me on payroll and I’ll build something more effective that this piece of junk! They didn’t do any dry runs or get any student opinion before implementing the new design which to me says tons about how they value our opinion.

You’d think they would consider the opinion of current students since its people in our age bracket and with similar tastes to our (moreso than not) that are coming to the site as perspective students…its aggrivating…and I’m afraid a lost cause at this point. Great Post.

Big schools like that need to pay attention to their web visitors experience more than ever these days. If I were researching which school I wanted to attend (which I’m not), I would take into consideration the look, feel and experience I had at their site. If a site is intuitive and well built, it makes for easier perusing, and that means they are in your environment that much longer to get “sold” the educational dream that they wish to pursue.

In today’s world the website that represents an organization is more important than ever before. The world of today lives in a “connected state”. The Internet powers more of our lives than ever before.

Sites that harness that power to the fullest, get “the deal” and those who don’t…don’t.

Nice write up!

The TAMU site is really what made me start thinking about this post topic. It just doesn’t make sense. Texas A&M has one of the five largest student bodies in the nation, and is consistently ranked among the top fifteen public schools. Why they can’t put together a decent looking official site is a mystery to me. They need to get in touch with Seattle University.

kartooner: Yeah, the Monroe site has some problems. Can’t you help? Haha. I suppose it’s just not a priority to hire a designer to manage the site. Typical.

One of the worst offenders of this is Monroe Community College, a community college I’m currently attending. The site just sucks, bad, and the usability is slim to none. You have to dig deep for any pertinent or useful information and that to me is a huge no-no when it comes to an University or college web site.

I’m working with my department to put something attractive together. We’ll see how that turns out, since I’m no designer, either. The TAMU site looks like a pop-up advertisement.

The main Harvard site has this awful tan color on it. Colors are key to attractiveness, and I don’t think that the tan does it — or at least not for me.