Website Assessment: University of Foo School of Bar

This paper is my assessment of the University of Foo Bar website (http://bar.foo.edu). I chose this website from the list of departments provided by Prof. Krichel. I wanted to be objective as possible so I randomly selected a school that I have not attended nor have friends at currently.

In the assessment, I reviewed three specific areas of design: page design; contents design; and site design.

In regards to the page design, I would consider the site to be acceptable, but not exemplary. The text is legible as it has a white background with black text. Visited and unvisited links are in the typical purple and blue colors, respectively. One drawback is that the links which work as pull-down menus, remain blue and do not change color.

The pages load fairly quickly due to the fact that graphics are limited and the site is text heavy. Only pages from outside of the website (other university departments) took a little bit of time to load but this was not a deterrent. The results were the same on the three web browsers I used (Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer) and at various times of the day.

A highly unfavorable aspect was that there was only one page title for the entire site which was not specific. The page title is "School of Bar." This causes problems in navigation. One problem with this is that it does not specify that it is the University of Foo which means that a visitor does not know where they are relative to the web. Another problem is that it doesn't indicate to a visitor where they are relative to the site (home, about, programs, courses, etc.).

The text on the website was often written well and in most sections applicable to its intended audience (prospective and current library students, faculty). This is an academic website which contains no happy talk or language which can be misinterpreted cross-cultural. Revision dates and URLs are provided for each page.

One content design flaw is that the home page does not give you summary information about the site but rather about the Bar School program. This is repeated and expanded in the About Us section. The home page does not inform the user about what they can expect to find on the site.

I find the overall navigation on this site to be its biggest problem. The site is not user-friendly in that the links are not intuitive. “Awards and Scholarships” exists in the “News” tab and is stated in the submenu of the “Academics” tab providing redundant information. The “Site Index” does not make it any clearer. A search box (which is not included on this site) may be the only way to get at obscure pages. Many of the pages contained in the site have to do with the University at large (e.g., Admissions, other departments’ pages).

The main graphic which is at the top of all of the pages does not link to the SLIS home page. The home page can be accessed by a link on the very bottom of each page. This menu bar fluctuates from page to page as it sometimes takes up one line and other times two. Under the Courses tab, in Firefox and Opera, there is an empty link. This could make the user think something is missing or forgotten. In Internet Explorer, this link sometimes appears as “Rotation” and disappears from the menu at other times.

The pages in the website are not uniform. Some pages (e.g., About Us, Site Index) have a redundant submenu which links to the paragraph under it. This is useless because there is not enough text on the page to make a difference and it clutters the page. Most of the pages use anchor text for the headings. The “Policy and Procedures Manual” has roman numerals for its various sections which each open on a new page that is navigated on the bottom.

The font on all pages is primarily Arial (sans serif). However, on the “Admissions” page there is a listing on which numbers 7-9 are Times New Roman (serif). There is no apparent need to switch fonts.

The “Admissions” page contains a link to a document which is not explained to the user. It is a MS Word document entitled, “How to be a Successful Graduate Student.” It is important to let the visitor know that the linked document is MS Word in case they don’t have that application. They should also provide the relevance the document has to the topic.

I think that the University of Foo’s School of Bar should consider revamping their entire website especially in regards to their navigation. The inconsistency of design from page to page makes it hard to navigate. When I ran the HTML validation, the website had many errors. I believe that the site does not achieve its general objective to attract students and faculty.

Note: I viewed the website between (September 20, 2008 to October 11, 2008).