Greetings,
First off, thank you for all your work on keeping TSU's presence online.
I have had some concern with the appearance of the front page for some time now and wish it looked a little, well, more professional, academic and higher class. I look at sites like
http://www.tamu.edu,
http://www.ucla.edu,
http://www.utexas.edu, and the like, and wish we had something like that to showcase our University. The current and planned layout just looks too "junior college" or "high school" to me. A few of my friends that I've talked to have said the same. As a fellow webmaster, I'd make more use of white colors and white backgrounds rather than purple all over the place. The new logo looks unprofessional. I think at least a refined, smoother version of
http://www.tarleton.edu/~finaid/tsulogo.jpg should be used, if not a totally new redesign all together. I would hate to think that a simple oval with 'Tarleton State University' written in it is now our University's new logo... Why such elementary Photoshop images??
Some creatively cropped, outlined (stroked) and appropriately placed photos would look nice here and there. Think black lines accenting edges of the page here and there with some Photoshop created buttons, not text, would help the page a lot. I'm sure you have to keep in mind those with slow internet connections, but some images instead of text created rollovers created in Dreamweaver would be a nice changed for our page. And image maps are hard to deal with; one has to be very creative and use the image aspect of the design to its fullest, and simply making a page with a few simple designs mapped and linked is not that appealing. On the pull-down menus, they seem to just come out of nowhere. I like the idea of a pull-down menu, but it should really integrate itself better into the site. The color codes don?t match the site?s background or anything else on the site. A purple color code needs to be decided upon, and I personally like the lighter one in the pull-down menus better. The purple used on the front page just reminds me of grape popsicles and kiddy stuff.
The main pictures for the main pages are low quality and some are crunched to fit the table borders, which looks bad. A nice digital camera should be acquired to shoot more professional shots. On the front page, the Tarleton 'T' in the background isn't even symmetrical (the drop down on the right is longer than the drop down on the left on the top bar of the T). There are just too many aspects that look way too amateur about this potential site. I would even go so as far to say the old page looks better. Even it still looks very amateur, but at least it's cleaner. I must admit, your page doesn?t leave the visitor searching for much; it's as standard and fairly user friendly as they come. But the entire image just isn?t that compelling whatsoever and could be much more aesthetically appealing. Visiting a University's site shouldn't be like looking at block-like images created in MS paint.
I?m not the world?s best HTML author and I really don't want to come off sounding harsh about your skills, but this University is deserving of a much higher class website than something comparable to my high school's back home. It should showcase the best of Tarleton and the best of our abilities, and this just simply isn't it. Please reconsider your design, your staff, or both.
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D. Chris Atkinson '03
Tarleton State University
College of Business Administration
http://chrisatkinson.net
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