Three sites this week, starting out pretty good was Royal Roads University. The site had an amazing use of white space and positioning. Everything had it’s place and it was easy to scan. But diving deeper the right and left columns stay static no matter which page you are on. This is great to get information on each page but takes precious real estate away from related information.

Free-Hardeman University almost hit it out of the park. The visuals and use of photography was awesome but they had a bit of an issue with lack of information for each major. Getting to each major was intuitive but then learning about them left something to be desired. Their code though was one of the few A’s, and just a few changes and it could be an A+.

Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia had more problems than I could count. For starters the homepage had announcements for current students that took prominence over prospective student areas. The second was the huge menu, six levels deep! Unfortunately the information and code didn’t get any better. I am thinking a complete overhaul is what this site needs.

If you’re interested in having your university (or one of your competitors) reviewed publicly or privately feel free to submit your site. Over half of the sites reviewed on EDU Checkup are by request.

This Week’s Reviews

Keep up up with @educheckup on twitter and RSS for more site updated in the coming weeks. Or if you prefer, an iTunes feed is available so you can get new episodes automatically.

Both sites this week did a great job! Their scores would have been higher but the code category pulled them down. The first, Deeside College had by far the most calls to action I have seen on a college site. Every page had at least one or two buttons for next steps and multiple options for a student to get a hold of an actual person. Phone, Email, Text and even live chat. The visuals and colors were vibrant and exciting. The site would have totally got an A if the code was more optimized. Something very simple but can potentially make the world of different for users.

The second site, Carnegie Mellon University – Heinz College didn’t far so well on visuals. The site overall is pretty bland, it sticks directly to their identity. The rigidness of the templates made the site feel cold to me. But they did a good job putting related information to the degree programs in the side columns, the “How much can you earn?” is a good touch. Like Deeside though the code quality really brought the site grade down, but again a few simple things can make a world of difference.

If you’re interested in having your university (or one of your competitors) reviewed publicly or privately feel free to submit your site. Over half of the sites reviewed on EDU Checkup are by request.

This Week’s Reviews

Keep up up with @educheckup on twitter and RSS for more site updated in the coming weeks. Or if you prefer, an iTunes feed is available so you can get new episodes automatically.

Just one site this week, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign gave us a few things to talk about. The vibrant colors really pull a user into the photos. The homepage wrapped student photos with a frame that showed more movement than the typical higher ed site. The menu items being in all capitals were hard to scan, although they were in alphabetical order it is easy to loose the first letter when they are all the same case. I think one area of improvement can be applied to the use of space on the child page. On most child pages the left hand column has 200 pixels of blank space  and the right column always stays the same. If they utilized that left hand space it would shorten up the length of the pages. In addition having related items on the right hand side would allow for some call to actions above the fold related to that specific page.

Overall the site was not bad, it did what it needed to do and scored pretty average.

This Week’s Reviews

Keep up up with @educheckup on twitter and RSS for more site updated in the coming weeks. Or if you prefer, an iTunes feed is available so you can get new episodes automatically.

First week of the new year started out with some great lessons. First the University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh College of Business has a very clean and easy to scan design. I wasn’t met with too many challenges but the one odd thing that stuck with me was the high prominence of an “admissions podcast” which ended up just being a single audio message. You could tell this was a non-web department decision since it didn’t add any value to the experience and a podcast is meant to be a stream of periodic updates.

The second site, Otterbein College didn’t far well at all. Initially the user is hit with a big red button that steals the attention from the rest of the page. Beyond that the navigation issues were countless. When I clicked to get more information about a program I was taken to the department homepage where I had to re-learn the new navigation to get to the program information all over again. This is not something a perspective student would have the patience for.

This Week’s Reviews

Keep up up with @educheckup on twitter and RSS for more site updated in the coming weeks. Or if you prefer, an iTunes feed is available so you can get new episodes automatically.