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Rachele McGinty-Mock DIGITAL STUDIO I, GRDS 720, Summer 2006 Professor Gauri Deshpande Exercise 4: Instructional/Educational Website Research, Part I, www.Yale.edu
You don’t need an Ivy League Education to negotiate this user-friendly site.
A.
I had to choose Yale University’s website to review! I am a lover of typography and the grid and Yale has such a classic reputation for their philosophy on the Swiss style up in New Haven, CT, about an hour train ride from Midtown Manhattan. Yale first mounted a University Homepage in September 1993. It was among one of the first 75 servers on the World Wide Web. The current website is an update to the one begun in 1993. I believe the target audience of this website is 17 years and up. This website covers a broad range of users from teenage prospective students to octogenarian alumni. The Homepage alone is very smart and effective to begin. It is a small homepage that can be viewed properly even on the smallest laptop screens.
A.
Upon initial rollover of the carefully designed grid, different site tabs emerge. The initial rollover is highlighted in yellow or gold just as the WELCOME TO on the header panel is. Just as user friendly, the bottom corners by the copyright information are a few different options right at your fingertips. Links to: 1. A Link to a Text Only Version of the site, 2. An about this website, 3. FAQs,
- IT policies and 5. Webmaster. Also on the bottom of the Homepage is a University Search Engine where you can search The Yale Web or People. Talk about a user smart and friendly site. The fanciest part of Yale’s homepage is the splash that changes every seven seconds to reveal a link to a latest/greatest splash of information. For example the above splash in bold white type reads, “Click here to view the Yale College online tour”. Leaving the homepage and progressing down the ABOUT YALE tab to different links. You see that this site is not very graphic heavy so far. This site so far seems to be very content driven. One reason may be that ITS YALE, they don’t have to sell themselves, people work their entire young adult lives to attend such a prestigious University. I believe so far this is a smart move. Continuing down the ABOUT YALE tab there is a link for Launch the Tour. This is a much flashier part of the site, it seems to be Flash animation and with a very smart drop down panel. This is a nice feature. Perhaps they think the ones who have actually been accepted will want to go to this site so it’s not as antiquated as other parts. When I begin the tour I realize it is in QuickTime, which I can’t remember the last time I saw a tour in that, it seems that most people are embedding QuickTime VR Movies into their sites lately, I wonder why this is? Continuing through this extra tab that seems never ending, there is a comic strip by an alumni, which is pretty neat, then there are charts and graphics about notable alumni, lots of famous people, obviously. From there I scroll down to YALE IN THE NEWS, also known as the Office of Public Affairs. This new homepage with the address http://www.yale.edu/opa/ is much more graphic heave and although works off a grid, it is one that is slightly different in proportion from the original one. There are all sorts of links available from here including a press kit and multimedia archive (here are all those QuickTime Movies I was looking for). I stop here to watch a video lecture of Frank Gehry and Paul Goldberger from the Spring lecture series.
http://www.yale.edu/webmaster/accessmemo.html, is a link, which has a very helpful resource site regarding accessibility, which covers the programming for the different sites. When we come to that unit I will post this page again. It looks like a very helpful site. The best visually designed part of this website is the page for The Yale Review. Its use of typography is classic and strong. It also stays true to the printed version of The Yale Review. A. In conclusion the Yale University website has a lot of information to get across and cover. They have a broad target audience that is as expansive in age as it is in location (international site). Although not 100% effective on all fronts it is a very successful site that achieves extreme usability.
Rachele McGinty-Mock DIGITAL STUDIO I, GRDS 720, Summer 2006 Professor Gauri Deshpande Exercise 4: Instructional/Educational Website Research, Part II, www.gcds.net
The $24k Tuition Gets You a Great Website for your K- 9
th
Grader!
B.
My second school website to review is actually also in Connecticut. It is the prestigious 80 year old, Greenwich Country Day School , in Greenwich, Connecticut. Greenwich Country Day School charges an annual tuition of $24,100 dollars for grades Kindergarten through 9th. The school boasts an endowment of $24 million dollars. With all that funding available I thought investigation of their website would be extremely interesting. In 2003 Silverpoint.net was hired to redesign the website of the elite private school. They used their Silverpoint Schoolsuite Software to create and maintain the site for the school. The homepage opens to a shot of the campus, which updates every seven seconds. All-important information including address and link to contact information is right at the top of the homepage. A panel of tabs is on the left hand side and drops down to review subheads from there. The homepage also offers TigerNET Login, a way for students, faculty and staff to check their own database of email and servers. The homepage is easily updated, today’s big news is the 9th^ Grade Graduate’s slideshow along with Summer reading list and summer camp information. The link to the 9th^ Grade slideshow takes you to a QuickTime Movie for easy viewing on your screen through your browser of the graduating class of 2006 for Greenwich Country Day School.
Next is the ADMISSIONS tab, which does a very good job of organizing a lot of paperwork and information and making it very easily available at the user’s fingertips. Eight tabs down is the LIBARAY tab and possibly the most impressive link. This is a wonderful research tool and I think this database and search tool puts to shame that of some Colleges and Universities. This page also offers links to some really good resources such as Webster’s, OED and The Greenwich Library. As a very smart move the next Tab down for PARENTS is a locked panel. This is an elite school that takes the privacy of its students and parents very serious. It makes a lot of sense that this kind of information should not be made available to anyone on the web. This would be very important to me if I was sending my child to this school. Silverpoint, Web Solutions for Schools has created a very effective template for their schools and it is down to an exact science. The Greenwich Country Day School website is not just a plugged in template, it is a site that has applied the brand of the school to the site from start to finish.
I really don’t know anything about this University other than its name and its logo. So I did a little bit of back research in order to find out perhaps why to begin with they are a DOT COM and not a DOT EDU. This is what I found: The University of Phoenix is actually owned by a for-profit company called The Apollo Group, which last year reported net income of $277 million against total revenue of $1.7 billion. Total enrolled student body: 107, students on physical campuses and 132,709 through their online program. The Homepage offers a few things. To start on the top are two main links one is ‘Enroll Today’ and the second is ‘Learn More’. Below these is a blurb about the school and their philosophy, below this initial paragraph you can navigate to a campus near you. Try an online program or just go to a main link entitled ‘I’m not quite sure yet’. Below these options are ‘Find a program’, ‘Learn More’ and a ‘Have More Questions’ panel. This last panel is a tab for a few more options. The bottom of the Homepage offers quick-links to certain places fast, copyright information and the University’s toll-free number. All of this is important information to have on the first page. Starting the site I decide to go to ‘Enroll Today’, to see if I really can! I decide from there to select Graduate Programs and enter my Zip Code, from there I decide to choose to go for an MBA in Marketing. From there I am given a form to fill out (C.2). C.
Deciding that I don’t want to be contacted by the University of Phoenix I decide to go back to the Homepage and try another one of the many options I was given. By choosing HOME on the bottom of the page I am directed to a different ‘default’ Homepage. C. Truly interested I click on Key Advantages. I’m completely interested about what they have to offer and why. This new Homepage is actually very usable. I assume this has to be one of the user-friendliest sites out there, because ultimately University of Phoenix is selling you an interface that you need to be able to work with if you choose to go to their Online University. The writing of this website is a bit sales-y and vague. It seems that to get the nitty gritty information you really need to fill out one of their forms and give them YOUR information first. I have not been able to find anywhere tuition information or schedule for the school year. This is making me very curious so I search for articles on this: I have found one article in the Chronicle, which list * Undergraduate credit hour: $410; master's credit hour: $505; doctorate credit hour: $550. Online tuition rate, on average, is 20 percent higher than rate for courses taught in classrooms. (http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i10/10a02901.htm) I am sold now that this is a sales site and so far lacks the education. I’m assuming when you enroll in the University of Phoenix you are directed to another site, like our BlackBoard that takes care of the education portion of the Corporation. This site lacks a lot of things most of the education sites I’ve visited have, like Faculty descriptions. Very interesting. In conclusion, the following is the biggest tell regarding this being a sales site: What’s the question WE ask most f requently? What's keeping you from getting started NOW and completing your degree? To take the next step, click here.
