Just took a look at Yale’s art school site, & it, not to overemphasize, gave me a legitimate headache.
As someone who has worked in a midsized university’s communications office, I’d say don’t let the website organization and design influence you too much, especially when thinking about your kid’s experience.
You’re seeing the public-facing side. The areas of a site most used by students generally require login and you won’t see them. In my experience they are developed and managed by an entirely different staff. An IT department is probably serving the two staffs. If those departments aren’t very good, then, yes, students could be negatively affected. To get a sense of that end, I’d ask current students about the apps and web-based interfaces they use on a regular basis.
That said, if the student services and financial aid pages look skimpy or like a jumbled mess, that could be a red flag. Your student is going to have to access these offices.
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If there’s a splashy mess on the landing page and overall navigation is poor that might be the result of admissions hiring a bad consulting firm. At a large institution, maybe it was developed in-house. That specifically doesn’t mean too much to me, but a school that has strong leadership will present itself well online. A good president makes that happen.
When I’m looking at a site to assess an institution, I often head straight to the academic section. Hopefully I can easily drill down though the colleges, schools, departments, and programs. Often some areas are more developed than others, and I think it’s fair to say that can reflect the strengths of the institution. Some deans are just going to be better, some programs are going to be stronger. Institutions just have some offerings that are better than others.
I am not artistic in any way, but all I can say is that the website for Yale’s School of Art is truly something to behold. And not in a good way.
If this were 1995 at the dawn of the public-facing internet, I might be sympathetic. It really would make me wonder, much like a very bad college tour etc. It’s a data point to be considered.
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I 2nd this. It looks like somebody who doesn’t know anything about web design actually designed it. I’d expect an art school’s website to be a lot better than that.
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It was SO bad that I actually looked at it in some detail. Apparently, anyone involved with the School can edit almost anything. This includes students, faculty, staff, etc.
It’s slightly better on the other pages I clicked, but the homepage is a disaster.
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