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

Site	Visual	Information	Code	Overall
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – Episode #137	90	71	68	(229/300) 76% C

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.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 16th, 2010 at 9:54 am and is filed under EDU Checkup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.