Re: Please review our faculty site
The page load time might have something to do with more than a dozen JavaScript files and nine stylesheets, along with active media files, that need to be loaded. The stylesheets themselves need to load images, then there are images loading directly to the page, and ... the HTTP request count is extremely high, more than will ever be reasonable for a single web page.
Consolidating all of the locally-served files into a minimum number of files will dramatically improve load time. You should only have three stylesheets, one common and two IE-version-specific, and a single JS file served locally; users will load at most three files, and non-IE users will only load two. Off-site scripts will still need to be loaded separately.
There wasn't a lot of content to be seen above the fold. I run Flashblock, and there is no way I'm going to enable other media players. No web site should ever play anything -- especially any sounds -- without the users' explicit permission. Even that, though, was not enough to get around things moving and blinking and generally trying to distract me. That's great if you're running a web store and want to call attention to your sale items, but it's a lousy way to run a site whose purpose is to make information accessible. The items on the notice board should all be visible and accessible at all times; users should not have to wait for the item that interests them to roll around -- and they may not notice when it does roll around, so they won't be able to find what they're looking for.
The text effect on your page title is out of place on a professional site. A single-colour font, perhaps with a thin outline or a drop shadow if you really can't leave well enough alone, would be much better suited to the environment. I would suggest leaving the abbreviated name of the university out of the main title (and dropping the scattered lower-case abbreviations everywhere). The university's name should be separate from the faculty name, perhaps a surround for the coat of arms (which, by the way, should be larger).
There is altogether too much going on. It looks like the result of a committee, where everybody got their pet content included. Simplify. Move things to their own pages. Most of the content seems to be directed at students and prospective students. Has anyone asked them what they want to see when they hit the landing page? The "about" information is fascinating, but it takes up a lot of room that could have been used for something much more valuable to the users, and a separate about page would provide the information to anyone who is interested. Notice board information is duplicated and placed on big, moving tiles. A clear, compact, stationary list would be much more usable. Alexa and pagerank information (like hit counters and analytics) may be of great interest to the site's administrators, but users have never cared and will never care about that stuff.
And do you really need the ads? It really makes the site look like something other than the public online face of a respectable institution of higher learning. If you need outside help to pay for the site, then find sponsors -- a subdued sponsorship notice with links will raise the tone of the site and the prestige of the sponsor(s).
Others have already pointed out spelling mistakes. They are just another signal that too much work went into widgets and media, and not enough into careful design of the site's informational architecture and content. (I personally don't think that social features have any place on a site like this one, at least on the front page.) Being "cool" won't get you users (and new students); being informative, discoverable and usable will.
I realise that's a scathing sort of review, but it's the review you need. You are the faculty of business administration at a university, not a game fan site. There is nothing about the site as it stands to give me confidence in the quality of business education I might receive there. Put away the toys and concentrate on what is important.
“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.” --Donald Knuth
"It was as if its architects were given a perfectly good hammer and gleefully replied, 'neat! With this hammer, we can build a tool that can pound in nails.'" -- Alex Papadimoulis (on TheDailyWTF.com)
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Originally Posted by jibon57
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