Friday, August 14, 2009
JMU.com Website Redesign
As I'm sure many of you have noticed, JMU recently redesigned their website. Now, so far I've heard mostly negative reviews. As a graphic designer and web designer, I wouldn't necessarily disagree, but we're going to do things a bit differently than the normal news story about this. Instead of just saying, "It sucks," how about we do an actual critique of the redesign. Let's keep this constructive and hopefully if we have some good ideas, they'll take them into consideration. I'll save my comments for later, as I want to hear your comments first. You can write pros and cons, give examples of websites you think they should model it off of...just be specific. Comments can range from the look of the site, to the information given, to the way the navigation works. Keep in mind all comments are moderated, so just writing words like ugly, horrible, terrible, (insert other choice words), or even "I like it" won't be published. I want to know WHY you like it or don't like it. This is about a website for an institution of higher learning after all. So let's hear it...
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From a design standpoint, I actually really like the new layout. It's very clean and organized. I just wish that the background color was purple with yellow or white font. The yellow type on the white background is a little hard to read especially when a smaller typesetting is used. JMU is all about the "I bleed purple" slogan so why doesn't the website reflect that?
ReplyDeleteThe main thing is that it is aesthetically not attractive. The colors are dull, the type is boring, and it has an overall feel of a website from the 90's. The feathered images, and gold-to-white gradients are all very basic, and contribute to the late 90's feel. It falls flat.
ReplyDeleteI do applaud the integration with facebook, youtube, twitter, etc. In honesty, I have not been able to engage with the site beyond the frontpage at all. Visually, it lacks focus. Your eye does land in one place - the large photo portion - which IS positive. But after that there is nothing that engages you visually. The eye wanters aimlessly.
I'm not commenting from an information architechture position at all - for all I know, this might be the asbsolute best way to organize all of this info. I just can't get past the bland visuals. I think they would be wise to hire the team that works on the Madison magazine to help skin the site. As an alumni, I've always found that to be excellent design - inspiring, made JMU feel as exciting as it was when I went. There are plenty of other amazing JMU alumni designers as well. From there, we could give it a real evaluation.
two cents.
Honestly, I think what would make this website better is if the main color were purple (instead of white) with yellow, gold, and white accents. I think that will make the biggest difference. Besides, the new formatting and functionality of the website is MUCH better, I don't think any of that really needs to change - But I'm not web designing expert of course.
ReplyDeleteI agree, the new design feels very early 90s, with the gold links floating on a white background. I'm honestly quite shocked that they decided to make such a big change, both visually and architecturally, without doing any user testing first (and I work at JMU, so I would have heard if they had). So many units on campus have documentation of how students (esp new students) can find particular kinds of info on the main homepage, and now that documentation is useless - giving everyone a heads up that the site was changing and allowing them to adapt would have been useful, but it just didn't happen.
ReplyDeleteAll the branding that the university has worked so hard for the last few years - I bleed purple, all together one, be the change - seems to be completely absent here. This is probably the most generic university website I think I've ever seen - there's none of the JMU spirit of excellence here. My two cents.
The first time I loaded it I kept waiting for the background to load then realized the page was done loading. Grey text on a white background is kind of tough to read (accessibility anyone?). As someone mentioned before, it's just bland/boring. For all the things that JMU does right, their web presence is sad. Let's review JMUsports.com next!
ReplyDeleteI think they forgot the second school color - purple.
ReplyDeleteAside from that, my biggest complaint is that it's a large amount of text for the user to take in, all at once. The yellow text is difficult to read, and the three "Madison" boxes can't be seen without scrolling on my 1050-pixel high display.
If the Madison elements are that important - and I believe they are, as JMU is not *just* about learning - then they should be higher up.
Overall... the big goal is to simplify, simplify, simplify. Make the home page less distracting and I'll like it more.