Your College seems to be idiotic

**Red_Lizard2** · 01-01-11, 10:33 PM

I swear to god NAU can not design an easy to use website worth a damn. I can't count how many times on 1 hand I've gotten lost on this piece of crap trying to find SIMPLE INFORMAtiON (hell it took a good 10 minutes to find out how to get a fucking I.D. card). Starting to drive me up a wall. And my current favorite, I apparently need to be logged into my student account to be able to see what active clubs there are at the school, uhhhh......why?

Maybe I just got spoiled with the easy to use website of my community college

**MaFioSo** · 01-12-11, 03:16 PM

Haha why don't you go speak to the dean and tell him that a NAU is a major university and it should have a decent website. In fact a bad website may give the impression that the university is low budget

MaFioSo

**Red_Lizard2** · 01-24-11, 10:12 PM

Its a major university, but I'm not sure anyone but the dean treats it as such xD (Okay, they have some really good programs, but not in any of the really "great" ones).

**rock_lobster** · 01-24-11, 10:42 PM

And is it just me or does the search engine for college websites give you practically no help with what you're searching for?

**Keiron** · 01-24-11, 10:49 PM

Depends on how good the website is. I think ours was pretty good. Although some people had issues I think they were just being idiots since I know we tested it and everyone else seemed to be able to navigate fine.

Depends on what you are looking for too. Having worked on my university's website I can say it isn't easy to code for all the various sections/departments and the content can be rubbish simply because the web master(s) aren't 100% in charge of content. At least at my university each department either gave us content to upload in the format we allowed or we set it up so they had limited access and could add the content themselves. Since universities are so massive, it makes sense to let each department control what they want on their sections to a degree.

**Red_Lizard2** · 01-24-11, 11:09 PM

this is NAU's site: Northern Arizona University - Home Page

Some stuff is easy to find thanks to the quicklinks, but it always feels like (outside of those) it is a bitch to find anything. Compared to my old school:

Eastern Arizona College Homepage

**Keiron** · 01-25-11, 10:41 AM

Yeah, the NAU one looks very dated. It needs to be updated as it looks like is still only really going for 800px width if that. Just makes everything look small and crammed by today's standards (at least for those with decent monitors/resolutions).

EAC Looks a little better at least and does look like it would be easier to find whatever you need.

University of the Incarnate Word

That is my university's website. We redid it before I graduated. I can follow it easily enough but it could just be because I've worked on it and know the site a lot better than most now.

**Red_Lizard2** · 01-25-11, 09:39 PM

UIW seemed like it was easily accessible, and looked nice (imo). Seemed like it wasn't much of a challenge to find anything, though wasn't looking for maybe more highly specific things *shrugs*

EAC's site last year I liked more, it wasn't much different outside the colors and the front page (I really don't like the new color scheme over the old one). Just my uneducated opinion but the old one looked more formal while the current seems to be trying for an "Exciting" look.

**Keiron** · 01-25-11, 10:10 PM

Most schools try to use their colors on their site to make it more recognizable. If they aren't those colors, I'm not sure what they're thinking, but really doesn't affect usability anyways.

**Red_Lizard2** · 01-25-11, 10:17 PM

Originally Posted by Keiron

Most schools try to use their colors on their site to make it more recognizable. If they aren't those colors, I'm not sure what they're thinking, but really doesn't affect usability anyways.

it is in the colors (purple and yellow) just I thought the purple was better imo