What a great week, the first site Saint Michael’s College really felt dated. The site was designed for an 800px wide screen which makes it feel constricted. There is some movement on the homepage right as the page loads which is really distracting.

The second site University of Notre Dame – College of Arts and Letters really hit it out of the park, almost a perfect score. The design was straight forward, everything had it’s place and is easy to scan. They were the first site I have seen that included an iPhone/iPod icon in addition to a mobile style sheet dedicated to a larger smart phone screen.

The last site, Northwestern College needs some real help removing their global navigation from the left column of every page. It’s so prominent it looks like it’s the navigation for that actual page. When on a program page there ends up being four menu’s on the page, this is very confusing to the user. They did do a good a good job with the designs of the four main promotions on their homepage which was nice to see.

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

Site	Visual	Information	Code	Overall
Northwestern College – Episode #154	71	64	60	(195/300) 65% D
University of Notre Dame – College of Arts and Letters – Episode #153	95	97	99	(291/300) 97% A
Saint Michael’s College – Episode #152	72	84	81	(237/300) 79% 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 Sunday, March 7th, 2010 at 3:37 pm 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.