Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

In this age of the internet, a website can tell you a lot about the organization it represents. This is especially true of college websites, where a visitor’s initial reaction to a small amount of information can lead to far-reaching decisions. I thought it might be fun to look at a sample of college websites and see what messages can be gleaned from them. Deeper content at most universities is handled by individual departments, making design quality a real crap shoot across the board, so we’ll be looking at only the top page of these sites.

Boston University
It’s only fair to start with my alma mater. This is a very recent redesign. BU’s website was once an antiquated, ugly afterthought that probably actively repelled a few curious high school seniors. The new look, by contrast, is meticulously designed to attract newcomers. The “deck of cards” redesign turns the main page into an attractive brochure, with navigation menus beneath.

Message: We care tremendously about reaching out to new students. Less so about the ones that are already here.

Brown University
Another deck of cards. It’s hard to figure out whether Brown ripped off BU or vice versa, but Brown’s deck shuffles up and down instead of side to side, so it must be different. The deck of cards is made possible through some clever Javascript, and it degrades quite nicely (Brown specifically touts accessibility for the disabled in its press release on the redesign).

Message: We’re just like BU, only, you know, rotated 90 degrees? Also, are you blind? Count yourself as double lucky. You can still come to Brown, with the added bonus of never having to know how miserable that color feels on the human retina.

MIT
MIT’s main page is essentially just a list of links on a page featuring a new background design every day. So MIT has a kind of postmodern not-design going for it.

Implied Message: We are quirky and artistic.

Real Message: We hunger for information. All else is little more than transient, meaningless ornamentation. We are Borg.

Northeastern
Note: Below, I’m referring to this design. Oddly enough, Northeastern gave its main page a major overhaul less than a week after I wrote this. It’s a huge improvement, though still not on the level of BU, Brown, or Princeton. Message: We are regular readers of Jon22.net.

Northeastern’s site looks nice enough, I suppose, but they opted to craft the entire thing with images instead of real text. With images turned off or stylesheets improperly rendered, the page degrades into an unusable mess.

Message: We expect you to come from an area affluent enough to have cable modems. Also, please try not to be disabled.

Harvard
Designed to be read on computer screens with a resolution of 640×480 and featuring a web-safe, pus yellow colour palette, Harvard clearly takes its design sensibilities from 1998. That’s especially weird since this design first popped up in 2002. I have no idea what to make of this. Like Northeastern, they also seem to have an implicit dislike for the disabled.

Message: Harvard has a long and storied tradition, one that we wish to honor. Just like we honor the ancient history of the internet.

Yale
Also a new design. Plain looking almost to the point of boredom, but pretty well put together, with rotating images on each reload of the page. I will always hate fly-out menus, but at least it degrades nicely.

Message: Yale. Who needs a logo?

American University
It’s decked out in an amateurish red, white and blue on the surface, and it’s just as ugly under the hood. This site manages the seemingly impossible feat of being less accessible and more poorly designed than Northeastern’s.

Message: Please, don’t come to American University.

Johns Hopkins University
It’s a pretty page, but like many others, relies too much on image-based navigation and a fly-out menu. JHU makes the especially bad mistake of combining the two. I wouldn’t be as mad if JHU wasn’t supposed to be one of the most prestigious medical universities in the world.

Message: If our navigation infuriates you, try to let this picture of a blue sky calm your rage. We’re studying your reaction. Right now.

Princeton
It may look like another Northeastern disaster in the making, but the Princeton site is actually programmed extremely well under the hood. The design sure is orange, and the content is very tightly packed, but other than that it’s quite good.

Message: Princeton. Orange you glad you didn’t have to use that scroll button?

State Schools
I am surprised by the level of quality displayed in state school websites. The University of Massachusetts’s page, for instance, is attractively designed, well programmed, and highly accessible. Ditto University of Florida (although less understated). Ditto University of Texas. The buck stops at the University of Oklahoma, however, which is cramped, ugly, and poorly coded. Its domain name is also “ou.edu,” which would suggset Oklahoma University instead of the University of Oklahoma. In general, the quality is a pleasant surprise. I wonder if state funded universities are mandated to maintain certain accessibility standards for all users. This would lend itself to good practices in web design and layout, ultimately leading to a good design.

Message: We really, really do want you all to come here.

So how about you? How does your school’s site measure up? Or any others, for that matter.