Figure 2.2:
+ The diagram does tend to be true for the case of Washington State University. Although there are sub categories that will take you to jobs or applying to the school, a lot of the information someone would want to look up are not necessarily on the front page. In fact it is easier to type in the search engine for what you need rather than surfing the website until you stumble upon it. Overall I agree with the image minus the middle section that is cross referenced between "what is on the front page" and "what students go looking for" since it seems silly to go to a site if all you want to do is look up the full name of the school.
Analyzing a University/College Website:
+ California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
In the diagram of the relationship between what students "go looking for on university websites" and what happens to be on the front page of the website tends to be true to WSU. But looking at Caltech's front page the diagram disagrees. The front page of Caltech has links to applying to the school, working there, an academic calender and a directory link on the side. Their site's purpose is to help the student or parent navigate the website, not compete with other schools necessarily.
I think that the reason for the front page looking different to figure 2.2 is that the school is more of high-class, well-known technical college that has authors more focused on the function of the website as opposed to the advertisement of the school. People who want to go into specific fields of sciences or technology know that Caltech is a popular choice and thus advertising is not necessarily high on the priority list. They are more of a science and technology based school than others which leads me to believe that they intend their audience to need or want the website more practical to navigate. The visual mode is least important compared to the linguistics of the website.
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-Julie Harrison
I just visited the Caltech website and I agree, it is very well layed out. I like how everything that you would want to see is right in front of your face and there is not a lot of "fluff". I can agree that on the WSU website there is more of what is on the left side of the diagram. Although I agree with you on that, I still must say that I like the WSU's website better. The Caltech's site is very plain looking and not appealing at all. It is mainly white with very little color and plain font, while WSU's site has moving pictures and is more appealing to the eye. Great post though!!
ReplyDeleteI'm going to second that the Caltech page is much more bland, and actually there isn't much I would say that hasn't been said above me, but I do think that it almost seems like The Caltech page was designed to be just enough to work and hits an opposite extreme on website design compared to the WSU page.
ReplyDelete-Brandon Fair
I agree with your last statement regarding the the linguistic mode of the website being prioritized further above the visual aspect of the site. This site is a good example of a university website that is more tailored toward the school's mission statement rather than the number of students in the population.
ReplyDelete