November 07, 2007
Office of Undergraduate Admissions
[the] Office of Undergraduate Admissions redesigned the undergraduate admissions website in 2007.
The site was built by Michigan Marketing and Design. There are no clues about the underlying content management system in the page source.
The site is built centered; the masthead is 980 pixels wide and the content 800, creating a shaft-capital, column-like appearance. The layout was achieved with 4 nested tables and some semantic HTML. Ten easily fixable validation errors were found on the front page, which is coded in XHTML Transitional. The type, Garamond and Arial, creates nice contrasts, but is always set in fixed sizes that occasionally trend small.
There are 23 top-level navigation links on the homepage, and none of them appear to lead to any new communication tools. No RSS or events feeds are available. The front page appears to be static content. The admissions staff does not post recent news and there is no visible two-way communication except for "Blogs en Español". (other colleges have added communication features: the U of Chicago runs a friendly blog with comments on; Cornell, student-published blogs)
Google Analytics tracking code is embedded at the bottom of every page, so the team can base future decisions on site metrics.
Screengrab from 7 November:
November 7, 2007 05:16 PM