Wrapping up another week with two site reviews and a lot of insight. The first site, University of Northern Iowa looks like it came out of 2005. The site was overwhelmed with too much content on the homepage and not enough breathing room to make it scannable. The boxy style was not inviting and made the experience feel very cold. Finding information was the best of the three categories, but even then I could not award it anything more than a D- grade.

The second site, Texas State Technical School looked like it was redesigned fairly recently and the entire site used the same template. Sections of the site were easy to scan but at times I found the text have too much of a consistent style that it was easily overlooked. Finding degree information was also quite easy but once I started to investigate a program the specifics seemed to be disbursed between locations. Some had a lot while others had very little. I felt there is opportunity for more cross promotion of campuses on each program information page.

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
Texas State Technical School – Episode #294	80	82	70	(232/300) 77% C
University of Northern Iowa – Episode #293	46	62	39	(147/300) 49% F+

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, January 22nd, 2012 at 6:21 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.