Williams College

This week I'm writing about my undergraduate school, Williams College.

Intended Audience:

• Prospective students looking for admission information.
• Current students needing information about anything to do with the college - registration, tuition payments, department info, campus events, Blackboard, phone numbers and emails, etc. etc.
• Alumni using the site for reunion information, the Alumni Directory, info on how to give to Williams, and looking to see what their money paid for.

Usefulness of Content:

• Extremely useful. I think it's safe to say that you can no longer attend college without looking at the website on a frequent, regular basis - once a day or more. So pretty much all of it is useful to current students.
• Content is pretty useful for prospective students, too - although checking again, I realize that some content is outdated (ex: "Williams in Pictures" in the Visitor's Guide shows photos of the student center that hasn't been standing since 2004, and none of the brand-spankin'-new one they built. To find it, you have to go to www.williams.edu/go/studentcenter to get there, and there's no link to it anywhere from the main page. Navigation creeping in, sorry.)
• One other point on prospective users: unlike the '62 Center page I reviewed in my first post, the Williams home page clearly displays the town, state, zip code, and country in the bottom left corner. Sneakily, one doesn't find out until much later where exactly Williamstown is in relation to other places (answer: too far for most people).
  
• The Alumni Directory is pretty handy, too - it's one of the only reasons I visit the site anymore. They also make it very obvious where and how one makes a gift - which, in retrospect, is not as useful to the alumna user as it is to the institution, but still.

Consistency of Design:

• Mostly consistent. The pages stemming from the Williams homepage all bear the purple banner and drop-down menus across the top, and is 100% consistent.
• However, academic departments have their own pages, and it's kind of a crapshoot as to how they're going to turn out. Some are very good - like Philosophy and Classics - and some are pretty boring - Art (surprisingly) and History (kinda not-so-surprisingly).
• Also, on-campus entities have their own pages, like the '62 Center. Contrast the Williams homepage with the '62 Center. It's staid New England foliage vs. the Candy Land color scheme on acid.
• Upshot: a lot of consistency within Williams homepage, and very little among department and venue pages.

Ease of Navigation:

• Like consistency of design, this one is kind of a mixed bag. For anyone within the Williams main site links, navigation is pretty easy. You are always able to link back to the homepage and the drop menus.
• I always particularly liked the "Especially for..." menu. I just contrasted the links to "Academics" that are on the "Especially for Students" page, with the actual drop-down "Academics" menu. At first I thought, why would you go through the student page for an academic site, when you could save steps with the drop-down? Then I saw that while most links are the same (Departments and Programs, Academic Calendars, Information Technology, Honor System, etc), some are different. The "students" page lists specifics of the drop-down menu, but call attention to it. For instance, Academic Resources is one of the choices in the Academics drop, but is not a choice on the Student Academic page. What's there instead? Blackboard, Math/Science Resource Center, PeopleSoft/Registration. I realized it was a better design to do this, since a student is not going to be thinking in broad terms of "This is an academic resource, better browse them all" - instead, a student is only going to think, "I need to go to Blackboard, I need to register," and they will want (and have) links that take them directly there, instead.
• The last navigation thing that infuriates me is the fact that not all of the department sites have links back to the Williams homepage. I haven't browsed them all, but I'd say of the 10-12 or so I looked at, only 3-4 pages linked back. Even worse, because the link to that department's page doesn't open in a new window, if you want to go back to the Williams page from a department, you've either got to use your browser's back button, or open a new tab and load the homepage again.