Best university websites

Doing some research for a project at work (redesigning research webpages), and, seeing as there are so many grad students, academic, library people, web people, etc etc, on ILX I thought I'd ask here.

What are the best university websites in the world? Why are they good?

Oh god, so many university websites are tangled messes of spaghetti.

Indeed; many, many, many of them are horrific.

Not a whole site, but KCL's online prospectus is nice. Simple, looks good and crucially, it acts like a website and not like a thick book of paper pages.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/prospectus/

ya much more experience of being unable to find things (sometimes quite terminally, even after quarter of an hour of searching - I'm looking at you, Nottingham Trent and Leuven) than having an easy ride. I guess the University of Dundee one is alright, at least before you get to the specific department pages - always a good idea to have areas linked to from the multiple intuitive places you're going to go looking for them.

LSE one has recently been redesigned (full disclosure: I work there) and looks fairly clean and uniform: http://www.lse.ac.uk/

the red is a little full-on

SM, I've just thrown yr query out to our web team (Uni of M/cr); they redesigned the website for our faculty last year and am sure they did a raft of comparisons with other institutions as part of this process.

xp yeah lots of red, that's the chosen corporate colour though...

Possibly a good springboard for your research: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/03/19/showcase-of-academic-and-higher-education-websites/

I haven't looked at that particular feature, but ^ is generally a good resource for web design/development-related miscellany.

Odd that you should post this query today, actually, b/c I am just now in the process of starting a new project: redesigning the 'law review' sub-site for a (fairly) major university.

I have not worked on a lot of academic-related projects thusfar, but when doing so I've generally tried to err on the side of simplicity, low-intensity graphics, ease-of-use & esp. NAVIGABILITY b/c

Oh god, so many university websites are tangled messes of spaghetti.

― kkvgz, Thursday, July 8, 2010 8:02 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

is OTM

I've gotten completely lost in certain German and French university sites before (and not because of the language) - you could tell they originated in written brochures and were ported by someone with no idea of what a website should look like.

UK sites tend to be ok in my experience. The Cambridge site isn't very attractive but I can generally find what I'm looking for.

I can't really speak for other unis, but at the place I work, the big pages are done by the web team and everything else is 'maintained' by departmental secretaries and the like, who have been badly trained to use our pretty bad CMS. So that's how the spaghetti happens.

On a related note, some dude is commenting on university logos: http://logospotter.co.uk/ He's not critical enough for my tastes - he really needs to rip into some dreadful ones to keep it interesting.

I...have no idea. Maybe it's good? (I don't actively use it for my work here.) So for that reason, I'm curious to see what others think:

http://uci.edu/

I can't really speak for other unis, but at the place I work, the big pages are done by the web team and everything else is 'maintained' by departmental secretaries and the like, who have been badly trained to use our pretty bad CMS. So that's how the spaghetti happens.

Same here. We paid a lot of money to some fancy web contractors to do the front page and admissions, etc. Beyond that, there's a soup of different departments and faculties, with hapless administrators using the CMS or saving Word files as html.

More technical departments might have not just those administrators but a handful or even tens of people all doing their own sub-sites, with any skill level between "don't know html but got the departmental budget to spend a lot of money on Dreamweaver" through "had a static page on Geocities in 1996, has the web changed since then?" to "actual web guru (possibly with militantly different ideas about web guru-dom than the main web team".

Every university web site I have been to has been impossible to circumnavigate. Finding the academic calendar shouldn't be like looking for the treasure of the Sierra Madre.

saving Word files as html

Oh god, yes, this.

@Ned: UCI website looks like a standard university website, which is a good thing imo because I know immediately where to go if I want to find something. For examle www.cam.ac.uk has basically the same top-level categories.

Same here. We paid a lot of money to some fancy web contractors to do the front page and admissions, etc. Beyond that, there's a soup of different departments and faculties, with hapless administrators using the CMS or saving Word files as html.

More technical departments might have not just those administrators but a handful or even tens of people all doing their own sub-sites, with any skill level between "don't know html but got the departmental budget to spend a lot of money on Dreamweaver" through "had a static page on Geocities in 1996, has the web changed since then?" to "actual web guru (possibly with militantly different ideas about web guru-dom than the main web team".

Various parts of the NHS are like this as well. It makes me cry that I know someone who puts "website maintenance" as part of her job description when what she means is "uploads word docs and creates hyperlinks to them via Adobe Contribute".

(I realise the NHS is not a university, so I'll let you back to the subject in hand now)

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/university_website.png

http://art.yale.edu/

I lol'd

rip noise board