eduStyle || 3 Things - Notre Dame University

In August 2007 Notre Dame redesigned their web site. In this "3 things" Stewart Foss looks at the good and bad of that redesign.

3 things Stewart likes

Popular Sites

Web 2.0 at it's finest. I love the slide down tray. It contains some very useful (and probably political) links without cluttering up the home page.

Expanding Menus that require a click

Flyouts just confuse and overwhelm me when they do their thing unexpectedly. I like Notre Dame's approach to this. It gives me the feeling that, even though I am technically going nowhere, I am still drilling down into the site.

The Carosel

This is just wow. Call it coverflow for your college. It is a very visually compelling way to present multiple "featured" items, and it's just sexy.

3 things Stewart doesn't like

The Carousel

This sexy feature does have it's downsides. It requires multiple seconds to load even on a blazing fast connection (c'mon I'm from the McDonalds generation ... I want it now). It also requires a bleeding edge plugin that could cause a lot of users to miss the big punch of this page.

Nothing About the School

Now this may not be necessary for a place like Notre Dame, but I generally want to see a little bit of "about" information on the home page. You know like "Notre Dame is a 4 year college ... "

Buried Navigation

The Audience navigation is buried far below the fold of a small or even average sized monitor. This may be intentional, but it seems problematic to me.

Continue to Drew Gereats' 3 Things »

About the Author

Stewart Foss is the Manager of Web Services at Grant MacEwan College and the creator of eduStyle. Here are a few sites that Stewart Foss likes.

Want to write?

Are you feeling the itch? Do you want to participate in a future 3 things? Do you have an article or how-to that wants to be published? Drop me a note and you may get your wish.

3 Things - Notre Dame University