The site is really attractive, and obviously a tremendous amount of work went into it, but if you don’t mind a few suggestions, try this:
Take some actual prospective students and ask them what they would be looking for if they went to the web site of a college they were thinking about attending.
Then sit them down in front of the home page and ask them what they would click on first if they were considering coming to the college (and why).
Then ask them to perform the following tasks (one at a time) and watch what happens:
1. Find out when the upcoming term and the one after that start and end and when the holidays are.
2. Pretend you are interested in Anthropology. Find the Anthropology department’s web page to see what Anthropology courses are offered in the coming term and what the prerequisites are.
3. See who the Anthropology faculty are, which classes they teach, and a little bit about them.
4. Find the process you would go through to actually become a student.
Educational institution’s web sites always seem to present things from the point of view of the administration. Everything that would look good on an administrator’s resume is right up front, but the things a student (or a prospective faculty member) would actually want to find are either hidden or missing. To me, they always look as if their primary intended audience is the members of the state legislature.
I spent some time at your site and, of the four tasks above, I only had any success with the third and fourth, and those with a fair amount of difficulty. I got to the registration info only after I finally noticed the tiny "admissions" link a the very bottom of the page among all the other insignificant links there (and that link is gone if I click on any other link first), then I had to find the equally subtle "Admissions site" link on a very crowded next page, and finally, a not-very-salient "steps to apply" link on a very crowded third page. I know what "Admissions" means in college-speak, but many prospective students, who have no experience with college jargon, would have a very hard time finding even that first link, IMO.
Similarly, finding the Anthropology faculty required finding the small "Academics" link at the bottom of the page, a term that’s fairly meaningless to most prospective students (since they think of the whole college as "academics" if they know the term at all) and it’s something they wouldn’t expect to find in such a minor link. Then I had to wade through a ton of text and links and find the "College of Social & Behavioral Sciences and Social Work" link (I’d like to see a video of the meeting where they came up with that college’s name). Again, expecting a lot from a student who may not already know where your college has put the Anthropology department. Using the site search for "Anthropology," the first link takes you to the college’s former web site where a message informs you that you can click on the banner to get back to the new site’s home page where you started. At that point, as a student, I might be off to look at other colleges with functionally friendlier web sites.
You can probably tell that I’ve spent some time cursing at college web sites that seemed designed to keep me from finding what I wanted.
I know that taking it out on you isn’t fair, but I seldom have the opportunity to make this complaint to someone who could actually do something about it.
All this doesn’t necessarily reflect on the site’s developers, since the client is always right and the client is always the college administration, but you might think about nudging them in the direction of bringing the academic departments and the needs of regular students a little closer to the forefront of the web site.
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