Choate

I'm inclined to think that a site with SO MUCH information calls for a much, much simpler interface. I'm not a usability expert, and I've never designed anything of that scope, but I think there are too many menus and too many options, and the site might benefit reducing the available choices. Also, I'm almost positive, having worked on university websites myself, that faculty and students are the two groups of people most likely to be using the site - but entry points for those two groups are in the smallest possible type on the front page.

In a nutshell: nice design at the possible expense of usability.

I have a lot of trouble with the hierarchy, it's quite overwhelming to browse thru the level 2 pages. Could some pages be merged to better group like content with a more general title rather than offering so many choices up front?

• 'support choate' offers about 6 or 7 choices that all seem similar, perhaps the overview page could make things more clear

• top level navigation inconsistently offers "overview" as an unnecessary choice since clicking the title takes you there

• 2 or 3 menus offer the menu title as a sub item itself, this breaks some logical rules for hierarchy (a title and a subheading shouldn't match, just as a menu title and choice shouldn't)

• some of the thick strokes makes it distracting to focus on some small text, but overall a nice job bringing some style to a conservative project

The navigation of this web is really confusing. The firstpage is centered, the subpages are aligned to the left, there are two main menus, the submenus jump from left to right with drop-down menus and there is one more main menu at the bottom! Come on! This is the worst navigation I´ve seen in a long time... no offense :-)

I actually think this is a very fine site.

Recently doing a school site myself - delivering a lot of content is not easy, to say the least. The presentation, strong structure and clean code strike me as very well-rounded site. Great work.

In agreeance with Jeffery Zeldman, navigation should never cover up design or content.

With that said, nice site and colors, but the navigation could be better.

I like it. Good job to transform all the content to a nice design including the menu.

This site is technically amazing. It has pretty advanced CSS, written in a very clean and organized way.

HTML is semantic, and written with accessibility in mind, althought CSS is less accessible (pixelled tiny fonts, image replacement).

Site is big, but still every subpage seems to keep the same, high standard.

First thing I did was check to see if that dropdown menu worked in Mac IE 5. It does. Nice.

Second thing I did was notice (on this page) that Shaun Inman did the site. That would explain why everything "just works" then, I guess.

OMG. Coming from someone who's full time job is to design and architect a school site, let me tell you this thing kicks some serious ass.

Gathering content alone is a nightmare and the politics of who gets to be on the main page keeps me awake at night. Whoever did this site deserves much praise and applause. I'm dead curious about the publishing aspect. How is the content being maintained? Is there a CMS?

Wicked good. Man that's slick. Anyone who doesn't appreciate the sheer enormity of the content and IA really needs to look a little deeper. Pretend you are a user who has a goal besides looking at the "IA". Pretend you're looking for specific academic information. Or a faculty member. These sites have more different audiences with more needs than any other type of site I can imagine.

It's really great work. And it just looks so pretty. I can barely contain myself. I want to be this designer when I grow up. :-)

A very fine site indeed, graphics wise anyway. The navigation may work on IE5/mac, but it doesn't on IE5/Win. Still, a very worthy design from one of the most interesting players in the industry.

I agree with Lisa: when I grow up, I want to be able to design a site like this.

It just works - there are very few chinks in the whole thing.

The home page is the weakest part. Was it's size dictated by committee? It look like it...

I don't see what's so good about this site. I really don't!

I've updated the credit from "Shaun Inman" to "Silverpoint" (a team that includes Shaun) at his request.

As someone who works full time as the web manager for a state university, I have to disagree with those who think the navigation doesn't work well (and J Oxton, but that's a given... ;). University web site navigation is possibly the most political aspect of any form of web design, and is the definition of design decisions made by committee. Given that, Silverpoint did an excellent job with what must have been a frustrating design constraint to deal with.

I do agree that the home page isn't as strong as the rest of the site. However, university home pages are ususally only slightly less political than the site navigation...

To appreciate the humongous amount on information gathered here, check any page with the stylesheet disabled you'll see what I mean. An excellent job this site.

yes it was.