Today, you may have noticed new changes to the psu.edu home page again.
We have launched what we have dubbed "Iteration 3" -- the third significant round of changes to the home page.
Highlights of today's update include:
- Greater focus on the Penn State brand, including the addition of a "Knowledge is our story" statement to the home page
- Deploying new landing pages for "breakthroughs in research" and "life in the global community"
- Modifying the layout of the Academics page
- Changing the name and look of the link to the Storyboard blog from "We're Updating" to "Redesign Blog"
- Adding a link to a new Redesign Feedback Survey in the lower right corner
- Replacing the images in the slider with a new set of images
- Removing "World Wide Web" as one of the options in the Search Bar drop-down box
- Having the "Headlines" header link to live.psu.edu
- Other technical changes
- Other minor cosmetic changes
Please weigh in with your thoughts on this update.
The "This is Penn State" link should keep you on the PSU homepage, instead of directing you to YouTube. Perhaps you can create a navigation on the link so open a new window with YouTube? Just a thought, it may help help keep the users on target with why they are on the homepage.
Otherwise it looks great! Loving the new look and feel.
Krystal:
Thank you for your feedback. We'll keep this in mind for a future iteration.
Why is this not being hired out to a professional design team?
The homepage is terrible. The Polaris team needs to focus more on making the site the visible face of the University and concentrate less on how functional it is to all the groups of people that need to access information.
Information access should be separated into different portals - Students, Faculty, Staff, Alumni, Parents, Visitors, Recruiters, etc. NOT piled all in one ugly mess of links on the home page!
See the link below for a list of good and bad examples of university websites. Penn State is on there for one of the worst.
http://designshack.net/articles/graphics/best-and-worst-design-50-university-websites-from-50-states
Aaron,
Thank you for your comments and suggestions. We have Content and Creative Teams working hard to refocus and redesign psu.edu. The iterative changes you are seeing to the site are for the purpose of addressing immediate necessities. However, later this year, significant changes will be coming. As the site has not been updated in over a decade, there are many things that need to be done concurrently to psu.edu and live.psu.edu, including changes to the infrastructure and the implementation of a content management system. We are confident that everyone will be excited by the larger changes coming down the line.
Sean
The site is absolutely terrible. It is hardly any different than it was before the redesign. It still looks like its a site from 1998. Who is developing this? I'm sure some kids who are in IST or even state college high school kids could make a better site. The site isnt even mobile compatible. When i type it in my iphone I can hardly see anything. admissions.psu.edu is a good looking site. the homepage needs to be more like this.
Sorry Chris, but I do not agree... There is no problem with the page at all - in my opinion. It is clear, simply, easy to use and we are not lost in the jungle of information like on the other page (admissions.psu.edu) you've mentioned. Anyway this is only the matter of taste, isn't it... :)Peace.. Robert
In my opinion, the site is simple and easy to use. It's a question of taste. I like simple design.
I would just increase the line height so it gets more readable.
For any font size, the line height must increase as the line width increases. What about another font ? Georgia ?
Regards,
Antoine