This week both sites reviewed recently launched a redesign, so recent that some of their pages still don’t reflect the new look.

The first site, Columbia University – College of Physicians and Surgeons, started out strong with a clean structured homepage but went down hill quickly. The homepage has four completely different menus in the header all for different audiences. That may make sense to someone who visits the site often but as a first or second time visitor, it forces them to look at and scan all of the menus and each and every menu item to determine where they should go. Beyond the menu it took a bit of time to find the actual degree requirements and unfortunately featured a program outline that was stuck in an image. A really large image that has all the requirements listed out but doesn’t feature alternate text. Someone with a screen reader or searching Google wouldn’t be able to use this information at all.

The second site, Northern Michigan University, featured a lot of images on their homepage, these really caught my attention. This combined with the large amount of text really pulled my eyes left and right as I was looking for the main menu. Once I found it I realized how many items were in it, nine items in a horizontal menu. Interestingly enough they were all readable and scannable which goes to show there isn’t a hard limit to the number of menu items that a site should have. It was also the first institutional homepage I have seen that includes a Web poll. This seems like a flashback to 1999 but I found it fun to vote and see the results. Lastly the search box on NMU’s website is larger than most, I found myself gravitating to it at times as an easy way to find information. I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing but it definitely is an opportunity.

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
Northern Michigan University – Episode #267	83	80	78	(241/300) 80% B-
Columbia University – College of Physicians and Surgeons – Episode #266	76	81	86	(243/300) 81% B-

 

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, August 27th, 2011 at 6:35 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.