To be fair, the intention behind CMS was simply to give the College’s Web site a facelift, and to that end, it can be considered a success. The site looks more professional because of the standardization in style. From a distance, it does appear attractive and presentable. But, don’t come too close or even touch it because behind that façade is a structural wreck in terms of usability.
A great Web site not only looks attractive, but it also has user-friendly navigation. Things should be easy to find; related information should not be more than a couple links away.
Large online retailers take great care in making it very easy for customers to search through their products. Menus, search bars and “quick links,” if applied effectively, can make even the bulkiest Web sites accommodating to users. These principles of convenient navigation are inadequately implemented in the College’s Web site.
Take the College’s Web page for current students (Amherst.edu/intranet), for example. There are basically three categories of links: “For the Campus Community,” “For Students” and “For Faculty.” The general layout is well organized, but the problem is that each category has about 20 to 30 links each. The most important links are in bold, but there are so many of them that confusion inevitably results, making it difficult to find the information one seeks.
Things become more complicated when the user delves deeper into the site. Some pages can only be found by following a certain sequence of links from the main page. For example, if I want to check how much of my e-mail quota has been used, I would first need to go to the IT Web site (cms.amherst.edu/it), read through the left-hand menu, click to expand “e-mail & Network Services,” click on “E-Mail” and then click on “Manage Your E-mail.” There is a slew of information on the Web page about how large student e-mail quotas are (110MB), but no link to check it.
Frustrated, I would then return to the previous page and find that the link for checking e-mail quotas is on the right hand side of the page, in a box filled with other links. The only way a user could have spotted that is if he had skimmed through every page before clicking on to the next one.
Another surprise is that every page beside the first one has something to do with e-mail. Because of this, there seem to be no clear directions for finding the link on checking e-mail quotas.
What about the convenient search bar in the upper right hand corner? Don’t bother. It may be helpful for some things, but in this instance, it is useless.
Try searching for “e-mail quota.” Click on the first result to find a botched Web page on which none of the links work. Go ahead and try it. Internet pages that link to nowhere—how’s that for irony? Now we know where mutant Web pages go to die (hint: the CMS).
The next couple of search results are equally useless. Search tools are simply not substitutes for practical Web page design.
The College’s intranet page would benefit from collapsible menus, like the kind seen in many popular Web sites. Some sort of hybrid between simple links and menus would make things less cluttered and easier to navigate.