@TAdams: The purple banner actually IS where your eyes should immediately go, as it holds the main navigation for the website. The grey links under the logo, while important, are just secondary resources that needed to be on the homepage. The reason our site was designed as you say, "small", is because 24% of our visitors are 800x600. This is just Phase 1 of a 3 phase launch, and not all departments have been redesigned yet. They grey area at the top of the internal pages is meant to be used by each department as they see fit. Some have several subpages that need to be up there, and others don't. It will look a bit different for each department because each department has different needs. Thank you for the feedback, and I agree that there is a ton of potential with the site. I did the best I could with only 4 months to completely overhaul the design and structure of our old website. It will continue to grow and mature, as all websites do.
 roarlions

I was readily expecting to see a full table based site and pleasantly surprised when I found none. I really love the design as it's different and creative in my opinion. The interior pages also have a nice look and feel to them. The font-size is entirely too small though and the line-height for content needs an adjustment, I found almost everything on the site extremely hard to read. Overall though, for a site implemented in 2004, this is an exceptional job, I'm actually really impressed this site is 4 years old and using full CSS.
 TAdams

I do like the design of the home page and a lot of the creative elements chosen, but overall there are things that push me to the thumbs down vote. I didn't even see the main navigation at first (that is right below the logo in grey on dark grey), my eyes jumped down to the huge purple banner, which while it looks nice, is not where I think my eyes should be immediately drawn. The site also just seems "small" to me, it looks like it was designed for 800X600 which isn't wrong by any means, it's just when 99% of the sites I go to now adays are for 1024 +, hitting a 800 site just looks "off" and "tiny" to me. I'm not a fan of the interior page layout at all either as I find the navigation extremely confusing. Of the 3 pages I clicked on, all had completely different navigation styles and structure. Yes they all had a common left nav which made sense, but some had "sub pages" at the top which don't look like navigation at all, while others had graphical buttons as subpages at the top. Overall I just found the site really confusing and hard to navigate with no clear "master" navigation and structure. Design has a ton of potential here. I'd love to see the structure reworked here for this site to really shine.
 TAdams

I think they got their end users a little mixed up when designing this site. Yes it is a school for education children, but are children the ones actually using the site? I don't think so. The color scheme screams Sesame Street to me; something children would like, but I don't think the parents and adults that actually use this site will appreciate. Also the mismatch of left justified, 100% stretching, and pseudo half of the content stretches interior pages really turned me off. This site needs some consistency and a better thought out design that targets the actual users of the site.
 TAdams

It's definitely not a favorite of mine, but it is a huge improvement. The design looks a little unpolished to me and could use some professional tweaks to really make it shine. Overall it needs some work with spacing, typography, and some of the navigation choices, but in the end it is a nice job so it gets my thumbs up.
 TAdams

I like a lot of the elements on this website like "My Midd Experience" and the photos on the homepage but the design feels a little too static and brochureware-ish.
 collegeDesigner

Nicely designed website and my only suggestion is to liven up the content throughout the site and to consider widening the page a little more so that the content in the middle column has more space to breathe.
 collegeDesigner

I like the design - it's simple, clean and spacious. Oddly, I feel this is what's also working against the design because this site does not feel very inviting to interact with it. Copying the printed table of contents into the website is not the best model for a magazine website. It was not clear that I could click on the titles to read the text, despite the big yellow arrows. However, there's a lot of potential for this magazine website if they made it more "newsy" like the NY Times or other newspaper websites.
 collegeDesigner

i love this site! Great colors, graphics and steady theme. I want to meet the people that made this site and ask for their autograph. Biola has been winning my heart as of lately.. (BU.edu has to show some work soon.)
 rolaine

I second what @msteciuk wrote. I have worked on two Library website redesigns and it's a nightmare trying to design an intuitive site that meets all the project requirements. Perhaps this site enables its users to complete their tasks successfully but I would definitely recommend that the navigation menus be completely redesigned and tested.
 collegeDesigner