YOU ARE HERE: HOME > WEBSITE REVIEWS HOME > REVIEW #5
URL: www.usca.edu
Reviewed by: Stefan Mischook
This web site is a little more challenging to comment on with regards to its' style because the websites' style changes as you get deeper into it. This changing of styles within the same website is in general a bad thing . more on that in the usability section.
The home page and several of the sub-pages are descent; they look a little dated but the school colors are used which leverages the school brand, and I like the generous use of student photos that gives the web site that 'school feeling' - makes me want to go get a beer!
They could have done a better job with some of the images, as they have been poorly edited. The menu that runs in the middle of the page, the newsletter sign up box and the 'got an admissions question' box are sloppy.
Over all I gave the style a score of 3 because I ignored the breakdown of the style on the inner pages - it's like several students were putting this together over time and they had to run off to beer bashes before the job was done! :)
This is an old style website designed with tables - this type of layout (left side navigation) is really easy to create with CSS and using tables just creates more work for everyone. When looking at the code and seeing how it is structured, it seems to me that they used an old version of Dreamweaver to create the pages - that is one major reason why they use tables to structure the pages.
Because this is truly an information intense website, it would make sense to structure the pages with CSS - makes it easier to update and easy to create additions while keeping the style and structure consistent . a major problem for the website now.
They have the DOCTYPE declared, but they have a couple of div tags outside of the </body> and even the </html> tag at the bottom of the page!
One last criticism is the copious amount of JavaScript at the top of the page, this should be in a separate .JS file for two reasons: neatness and the search engines; lots of JavaScript code at the top of the page can impact negatively with certain search engines.
When I first hit the web site it was obvious that this was a universities web site, that's good. The navigation is obvious and easy to use but as you dig a little bit into the web site, things start to breakdown and it quickly becomes hard to get around. There is a serious lack of consistency in terms of the flow of the web pages and on several pages we completely lose the navigation altogether.
The top problems:
I would define a CSS based layout and color scheme for the web site that would act as a framework that is contained in two simple files - an HTML and a CSS file. These two simple files could be passed out to all the departments and with little interaction between them, the website could be rebuilt and expanded with a consistent modern style.
