As a team leader of an upcoming redesign project, The eduStyle Guide to Usable Higher-Ed Homepage Design was very useful to me. My favorite section: Recommendations. I got more take aways and ideas of what to do (and what not to do) from that one section of every university’s review than anything else in the entire book. I don’t necessarily agree with all of their recommendations – but was convinced of their perspective and credence established based on most other comments. (Cornell – “groundbreaking design?”)
It’s clever to break down universities with their pertinent stats to give their page a bit of context — the size of their internal community, where they physically reside in the country, who their primary competitors may be, etc.
Pet peeve throughout the book: URLs that end in .com/.edu, etc. should not have a trailing slash at the end.
Wrong: www.doteduguru.com/
Right: www.doteduguru.com
A wide variety of design implementations are thoroughly reviewed and explored. It gave me a great synopsis of the types of features I’d like to incorporate into our redesign, and visual ideas of how to accomplish them. I was convinced of design styles to stay away from (low contrast links with the background color behind them) and that RSS icons can and should be incorporated (along with the being able to subscribe to the feed within the browser location bar – not just the icons).
Can you get most of this info on the edustyle.net site? Mostly. But, it wouldn’t be as concise as a 95 page handy guide at your finger tips with an easy to read/reference format – especially the Positives & Recommendations section after each home page screen shot. (Ok, so the site does that too – but not all of the comments are written with such care and professionalism, and sometimes turn into a conversation/debate.)
If you’re going through an upcoming redesign/refresh, are new to higher ed, or are looking for ammunition to clean up your home page and/or add new features, buy it. Read it. It’s worth it.
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About the author
Rachel Reuben is the Associate Vice President for Marketing Communications at Ithaca College. She was a blogger on .eduGuru from November 2008 - January 2010. Read her complete bio.
This post was written by Rachel Reuben - who has written 33 posts on .eduGuru
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