<p>What is it with some colleges? Their websites are often the "face" of their college until a student visits the campus.</p>
<p>Yet, I find some that are ugly, annoying (flashing stuff at me), and hard to find what I'm looking for (ex: Majors/program offerings, Cost of Attendance, professional school info, etc)</p>
<p>Anyone else notice this?</p>
<p>If you'd like, post the link to a college website that you think is a poor reflection of the school...</p>
<p>Some are more difficult to navigate than others, but I think all of mine are generally fine. Actually, I’ve barely used their websites because of Naviance, so it doesn’t really matter. I just find myself amused, however, whenever I visit one of my safety school’s websites because it’s LITERALLY the exact same page as their rival school (/the school they have to woo their prospective students away from) just with some different colored banners, font choices, and window dressings.</p>
<p>Yes! Drives me crazy if I can’t find the majors on the first page.
And now that I’m looking for a good example I can’t find any. My son has me going through bing for searching though and it has the main info right on the search page.</p>
<p>I know what you mean! What’s also aggravating is trying to find the financial aid info such as deadlines and such, and having to go through page after page and still not find it!</p>
<p>I’ve found it’s a lot more efficient to just search on google with a site search. So, say you wanted to find financial aid deadlines at Carnegie Mellon, you’d type:</p>
<p>site:cmu.edu financial aid deadline</p>
<p>The “site:<website>” limits search results to websites within that domain, so you won’t get other random hits. And, looking at my result for that search, the fourth result without even clicking on a page has, “The undergraduate student deadline to apply for Financial Aid is April 15, 2009. The recommended graduate student deadline is June 1, 2009. …”</website></p>
<p>Google is a great idea… but I totally agree. “College catalogs” don’t seem to exist any more, and one ends up going round and round the webpages-- which ought to be able to offer so much more information, better visuals, etc. and often seem to have less.</p>
<p>^ I agree, I miss the printed college catalogs, they were a lot easier to use than the online version that many colleges use.</p>
<p>Among the schools our son is applying to, the weakest website is Skidmore’s. First of all, that multi-green color palette looks drab and dank, which is not what the school is like at all when you visit it. The site organization is all over the place; every click seems to put you in a new environment from which no return to the old one is possible. It’s an Alice in Wonderland kind of user experience. Also, there’s some very funky presentational stuff going on at lower layers–cheesy script fonts, circa-1998 table layouts, etc. They also need to configure the server so the URL resolves without “<a href=“http://www.”>www.</a>” It’s just nutty that in the year 2010 you type in “skidmore.edu” and get a timeout. </p>
<p>Did I mention I don’t like Skidmore’s website? 
But we love the college.</p>
<p>Among other schools we looked at, easily the most amateurish-looking is St. Lawrence University. It’s better than having sand thrown in your eyes, but just barely. </p>
<p>George Washington U. also had a pretty funky site when we first started looking last year, but it looks like they’ve cleaned it up nicely.</p>
<p>S’s school is releasing an entire new website in a couple of weeks (supposed to be Jan but was pushed back). The site itself has become a little dated while they switched over so I am anxious to see the new and improved content.</p>
<p>But in a general way, I almost always use the search function of any school’s website because I don’t like the endless search. So unlike Google per say, I will type in course catalog and up pops the online version in the list. However I guess it would also depend on the college search function because some would probably return every result with college and.or catalog. Certainly not the point.</p>
<p>Northwestern’s is kind of annoying, frankly.</p>
<p>I just don’t get it. Don’t these schools get any negative feedback about their sites?</p>
<p>^ I know that Muhlenberg, my choice last year for the absolute worst college web site, completely overhauled their web site due to the negative feedback they received. The color scheme actually hurt your eyes.</p>
<p>Grinnell used to have the same problem with no-www resolving as timeout, but thankfully they fixed that with the redesigned website.</p>
<p>BobbyCT–absolutely right about Muhlenberg. That was awful. Much, much better now.</p>
<p>mom2collegekids–of course they get negative feedback (plenty of it internal, you can be sure). But revamping a college-sized website is a big deal. It costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time. So if a college invests in a redesign and it bombs, they’re stuck for a while.</p>
<p>^ “revamping a college-sized website is a big deal. It costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time.”</p>
<p>Any college with a computer science department had better not make this argument!</p>
<p>It’s not computer science they need but a good designer. It’s also super annoying when their “search” brings up the entire web rather than just their website when I’m looking for something specific. There doesn’t seem to be much of a correlation between level of school and quality of website either. I was on Columbia’s site yesterday trying to find something and it took me 3 different searches and at least 10 clicks to find one research center. When I tried typing the name directly into search it came up with nothing. Now, aren’t there any decent web designers in NYC???</p>
<p>*So if a college invests in a redesign and it bombs, they’re stuck for a while. *</p>
<p>I agree with that <em>somewhat</em></p>
<p>I’ve seen schools tweak their websites to improve. Tweaks cost money, but much cheaper than a redesign.</p>
<p>I’ve given up school “search” engines. Either it’s powered by Google anyway, or it’s internally powered and the algorithm is useless. Use “site:<collegewebsite.edu> <search terms=”“>” on Google proper.</search></collegewebsite.edu></p>
<p>This was one of my biggest gripes during the application process. Not user friendly at all.</p>
<p>Cornell College and Hendrix have outdated weblinks (Cornell has had a scholarship page broken for the past year, Hendrix has the only education teacher listed as one that has since left the school). One whose name I can’t remember did this thing where you couldn’t open new pages in a new tab, while another made it nearly impossible to go backwards from a specific page to a general one (minus playing with urls).</p>