<p>Actually, Dan, I see a lot of students on this thread, too, but I won't split hairs over head count. I do agree with you that there can be a big generation gap when it comes to the way that teenagers and parents navigate Web sites (I've watched my own 11-year-old on YouTube!). But, nonetheless, I get a ton of queries from my counseling clients (the students themselves) who are asking questions that should be easily found on college Web sites (e.g. "Does this college offer on-campus intervews?") but often require an annoying search to unearth. Likewise, my "Ask the Dean" letters commonly come from students who are flummoxed when trying to get info from college sites that they know is there ... *somewhere.<a href="And%20one%20of%20the%20most%20frustrating%20ever%20%22Where%20the%20heck%20is%20it?%22%20episodes%20dates%20back%20about%20five%20years%20to%20....%20drum%20roll,%20please%20...%20Tufts!%20That%20was%20when%20the%20Tufts%20Common%20App%20supplement%20made%20a%20reference%20to%20an%20optional%20essay%20question%20on%20%22page%204.%22%20But%20the%20Tufts%20supplement%20only%20had%202%20pages.%20Candidates%20had%20to%20figure%20out%20that%20the%20question%20could%20only%20be%20found%20on%20page%204%20of%20Tuft's%20%5Bi%5Down%5B/i%5D%20application.%20Tufts%20has%20long%20since%20corrected%20that%20oversight.%20Ironically,%20the%20optional%20question%20was%20something%20like,%20%22Provide%20instructions%20on%20how%20to%20do%20something%20that%20you%20know%20how%20to%20do.%22%20One%20of%20my%20advisees%20said%20she%20might%20write%20on%20%22How%20to%20locate%20the%20Tufts%20optional%20essay%20question.%22%20:">/i</a> )</p>
<p>Anyway, the information that seems to be most consistently mentioned as unnecessarily hard to locate is often the stuff that's more in the parents' purview than the kids'. For instance, "How much does this college cost? What scholarships are available?" can be among the first thing that Mom and Dad want to know but further down Junior's pecking order. </p>
<p>Even the very basic mailing-address question is often a Mom (or Dad) thing, since it can be the parents who are Mapquesting the visits or mailing manila envelopes full of resumes and newspaper clippings. </p>
<p>So I think that even if parental priorities play second fiddle to student needs and surfing styles, there are plenty of changes that colleges could make that would be welcomed by all of us. I'd also love to see more consistency among college sites, but that's probably an impossible dream.</p>
<p>I understand why a college would tailor its web presence to the surfing habits of high schoolers, but please do not entirely abandon those of us who prefer the library approach to research to the cineplex . One obvious link around all the hype directly to the hard facts is all it takes to please a lot of people who write checks.</p>
<p>I don't know if this has been mentioned but many college sites seem to have extremely rudimentary departmental pages that don't seem to be updated regularly. I wanted to find up-to-date info about course offerings, syllabi,etc, to get a real sense of departmental offerings but didn't find it very often. For example, I wanted to know who the Fall 2008 visiting professor was in the english department, kept going back to the site, and it was not posted until well into the fall semester. It seems that at many colleges, the individual departments tend to their own pages within the college website, so there was a frustrating lack of consistency. In this day and age, for any department to not have an up-to-date site does not reflect well on the college. And don't even get me started on the design.</p>
<p>And personally, I get tired of seeing home pages that are obviously geared toward fundraising. It's a turn-off.</p>
<p>i hate colleges that don't give a good list of majors... and those that won't tell you the required freshman courses... also ones that you contact and you tell them the specific courses that you want and they send you junk about other courses and never the course you specify</p>
<p>There are many places where you'll never find course syllabuses for reasons completely unrelated to web usability-- they're purposely not available to the public due to IP-type concerns. Some professors are surprisingly tight about these things. Not that I agree with it, but there often are no resources like that even for current students so I wouldn't be expected it as a prospective student (and frankly, it's not all that helpful for prospective students).</p>
<p>Another thing to note: at Brown we have people all the time directed to the wrong Prospect Street about 15mins from Brown when the address is entered into some GPS units (of course, Brown is a place of interest in most of these things, but no one checks that). It's becoming an issue-- twice when I was giving special tours I've had to wait 20 mins extra because they were directed the wrong place. It's pretty difficult to get these things fixed so I almost wish Brown didn't supply a main address because of this.</p>
<p>I wonder, how many of those who are unhappy about your surfing on college pages have tried site maps or search boxes to find what you want? I have the Brown webpage basically memorized and I still use the search box and A-Z index all the time to get where I want fast.</p>