Okay. People go through ordeals and, from those ordeals, we get experience. Experience in dealing with certain types of people, with handling tools or vehicles; in short, any activity in life that you can shake a stick at, and stick-shaking itself. And, I'm going to divulge what I've learned on my journey for Higher Education in the future, in other words, sifting through the steaming excrement of University websites.And I'm going to be a bit frank here, I didn't quite like it as much as I wanted to.
I have, as a matter of fact, handled and interacted with websites created by pre-pubescent boys that had a better sense of 'intuitive design' than the overpaid crockpots that make University websites. Yes, it's easier to navigate a site about ninja, game systems and Naruto fanfiction than it is to see the basic information for a University-level course.
In general, when you design the front page of the Website, you should design it in such a way that you have all the possible needs of the visitor in front of him, behind a small, legible and aesthetically pleasing selection of links which concisely tell you what you'll find yourself reading when you treat said link with a humble click of the mouse. In most cases, I believe, a user would enjoy looking at a website to see the faculties, centers and institutes of said University presented, in and orderly fashion, in front of him, and thus allowing him to simply choose the course which he so rightfully desires to take. And once you click the title of that course, he should expect and receive the information for that course. So, basic information (like, say, possible course duration depending on whether you're part-time or full-time, the basic requirements, the outline of the course and even, if needed, the courses it opens doors to.) should be easily accessible from the very beginning, making good use of hyperlinks to cross reference to other material, related to what you're looking at, that sleeps dormant in the alleys and avenues of the website.
I'm not saying that the sites didn't have all the information. Far from it. I'm just saying that it was cluster-fucked between paragraphs of by-laws, information on other courses, hyperlinks that never quite made it and then having said information blown up and spread across the four corners of the pathetic excuse of a website.
What's more is the lack of standards in anything and everything, ESPECIALLY in information. Once, on the same University site I learned that a course in journalism could be completed in a year at full-time, two years part-time. Imagine my surprise when ten minutes later I see ANOTHER page on the site and it says it takes four years to complete.
Am I supposed to flip a coin here? I'm not Batman, and the web-designer isn't the riddler, so I fail to comprehend the reason as to why such basic information fluctuates more than the temperature of a woman's utilities during menopause.
Another puzzler I ran into was when I found that the CCT (center of communication technology) offered two diploma level courses, one in Journalism. "That's not a shocker though Mr. Shpow!" Well, no, but finding out they later pulled the ol' switcharoo on me did. Later they seemed to change 'Diploma in Journalism' to, what was it? Ah yes, 'diploma in archiving and data management'. Not much of an expert here, but I gotta say, that doesn't quite translate into journalism, does it? And they do this with other courses too, shuffling names like a card-dealer in Vegas.
And please, if you insist on writing references to by-laws on a website arbritrarily, the very least you could do is, oh I don't know, throw a LINK to the said law. It's not that hard, you do it like this. Not quite rocket science, and I'll even show you the code used to make that handy, clickable reference:
"<a href="http://www.blogger.com/">this</a>".
And you know what the funny thing is? It took considerable more work to make that bit of code visible to you guys in comparison to making the hyperlink. And I know as much as the next guy about HTML, and the next guy is Edgar. He's kinda illiterate and thought that HTML was an abbreviation of his next favourite burger at McDonald's. But I'm sure he'd do a great job nonetheless. Why? Because Edgar isn't a sadist.
And then we ask why people such as this student (fig 1.1) shoot up University Campuses.
Fig 1.1: Disgruntled student
"I WASN'T SURE WHAT COURSE I HAD APPLIED FOR. ALL YEAR! MOTHERF#%!ERS!"
