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Simmons College

Current rating: 5.9 (589 votes)

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  • Added: 04 November 2004

Review:

The web site for Simmons College of Arts and Sciences Graduate Studies is a great example of what web standards and good design can accomplish in larger sites like this. Earthy and tidy pastel colors, beautiful typography, and a warm feel is applied throughout the pages, and I love the way they used hand crafted paintings and high quality photos on each section. Unique but contemporary and comfortable layout solutions. The code is clean, valid and semantic except for some minor css definitions in the header. I'm not sure about using grey in the tabs though. The does also look promising, but fails to keep web standards consistency in several sections. Beautiful site.

Reviewed by David Hellsing

There are 16 guest comments so far.

commentat 19:02 on 04 November 2004, Bryan wrote:

Hmm. I am not a fan of the right hand tabs, but overall the design is nice.

commentat 11:39 on 05 November 2004, Alex wrote:

Nice site and code, but can you please add some padding to the top of the Simmons logo! :) Good job!

commentat 12:30 on 05 November 2004, Mark wrote:

Refreshing palette, clean typography (although can look a little cluttered deeper down). Nice to see illustrations being used as well.

commentat 13:16 on 05 November 2004, Adam Bramwell wrote:

Such a nice compact layout, and great choice of palette. The tag *afraid of commitment* makes me smirk also!

The iconograhy, illustration, it's all good. I gave it 8 by mistake, should be more.

commentat 14:54 on 05 November 2004, steve wrote:

This is a lovely site, the colours are just beautiful. Really nice use of rollovers. Not sure about the right hand tabs, but they do lead offsite. Totally agree about the top-padding on the logo, it looks really odd as is!

commentat 18:45 on 06 November 2004, Graham Sanders wrote:

May look nice on current browsers but suffers extremely on older browsers such as MAC IE 5.0

Personally I think all sites should take consideration for older broswers but hat's just my opinion.

commentat 22:15 on 06 November 2004, jeremy wrote:

Wonderful. Yes, the code could be improved but exceptional none the less. Anyone know who is responsible for it?

commentat 01:00 on 10 November 2004, Greg wrote:

navigation is scatterad all over the place... too busy IMHO.

commentat 06:56 on 13 November 2004, Monica Kerry wrote:

nice color combination.

commentat 03:58 on 17 November 2004, Shaun Gummere wrote:

Thanks for the positive comments! This site was designed and coded by the in-house web team at Simmons. It was our first stab at "pure" CSS-based design (which accounts for some of the less-than-perfect code), and culminates a year's effort to move the site as a whole in this direction (we had to support a large internal Netscape 4 userbase when we started the process). If you have any questions or want more info, feel free to email webmaster@simmons.edu.

commentat 14:18 on 27 December 2004, Tim Swan wrote:

Simply beautiful. The mix of strong graphic design and typography, complex navigation, strong branding, and very clean code makes for one of the best standards-compliant and accessible sites I've seen. Very, very impressive.

commentat 19:37 on 12 January 2005, Kristopher wrote:

Yes, I fell in love with this site too. But if all of us like this site so much, why is it getting a 5.2?

I felt compelled to ask the community this question however: As good as the palete, typography, and illustrations are, so you think that the different places of navigation are jarring? I felt that there were too many different places navigation was placed at. What does everyone else think?

commentat 05:39 on 20 August 2005, Doug Mellon wrote:

Hey my cuz worked on that site

commentat 18:34 on 07 December 2005, jakob wrote:

I believe this site was actually designed by BigBad (http://www.bigbad.com). The design firm had come up with the site's look and feel, and Simmons' web team maintains and updates it.

commentat 18:45 on 07 December 2005, Tom Neuwirth wrote:

Very interesting. I did some research and did find this:

http://www.bigbad.com/view_news.aspx?id=38

Perhaps not everyone has been given credit here.

commentat 20:35 on 19 April 2006, Shaun Gummere wrote:

The design and coding for the CAS Grad Studies site was completed without involvement by BigBad, though Simmons did work with them previously on the Undergraduate College and the School for Health Studies; the brand is of course generally consistent across all sections of Simmons' web presence. It was not my intention to dismiss their involvement in the overall success of the site. They are a smart, capable bunch, but did not actually design this part of the site. Credits for each portion of Simmons' web presence can be found at www.simmons.edu/about/site/credits.shtml


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