Finding info on a university website

[downer]

Is it me, or do you also find that if you are not a prospective undergraduate, then your school's website is not really designed for you?

Increasingly, I find that I'm much better off using a google search to find the right page rather than trying to navigate from the home page.

Often, finding the school's actual library home page takes ages. It is well camouflaged.

[brixton]

Yeah -- most schools have acknowledged the web sites are for the prospective students.  Many schools have intranets or portals for people who are already part of the community.  Some schools have moved their websites over to their prospective student marketing folks, and don't develop intranet/portal options, thus leaving the rest of us hanging.  I too resort to using google over my school's search function.

[onthefringe]

Xkcd agrees with you, but thinks even some things prospective students want to know are hard to find.

[hungry_ghost]

Right. I have also frequently had trouble finding a physical address for a school. "Contact information" often gives email addresses only. In one case (a smaller institution that I'd never heard of) I ended up turning to Wikipedia to determine what state it was in.

[Hegemony]

Our university webpage used to have a tab "For Faculty," but apparently they've decided they don't need that any more.  So the options now are Current Students or Prospective Students. 

[mamselle]

it's better now, overall, but schools, churches, all kinds of institutions used to have everything BUT their full physical/USPS address on their website.

I'd be charged with reviewing sites for a particular area of study, or trying to develop a list of those with likely vested interests in a project, and couldn't even tell if they were in my same state, or some other.

That's less an issue now, but there was a bit of time where it seemed like the website was just floating out there in the neant, and the group it represented only existed as plasma blobs in some other universe.

M.

[polly_mer]

Right. I have also frequently had trouble finding a physical address for a school. "Contact information" often gives email addresses only. In one case (a smaller institution that I'd never heard of) I ended up turning to Wikipedia to determine what state it was in.

I had that problem just today.

[sprout]

Like 90% of the time I just google "whatineed myschool".  It's just quicker

[onthefringe]

Like 90% of the time I just google "whatineed myschool".  It's just quicker

This reminds me of the time our IT people told us it was almost certainly easier to google "how do I do X in Canvas" than to try to use our internal help or documentation.

[paultuttle]

Like 90% of the time I just google "whatineed myschool".  It's just quicker

This reminds me of the time our IT people told us it was almost certainly easier to google "how do I do X in Canvas" than to try to use our internal help or documentation.

. . . an amusing yet sad admission that the current state of the art of university website design is not nearly as good as Monster University's.

[warning: interthreaduality vis-a-vis a very old comment on the Chronicle fora]

[Parasaurolophus]

Like 90% of the time I just google "whatineed myschool".  It's just quicker

Yup.

It's actually quite easy to find the employee portal at my current university, which makes accessing email, Moodle, and the waitlists pretty easy. Everything else, though, is worse than usual: library, department info (basically impossible to find; you have to find individual faculty members through the directory to navigate to the department page, but you can't access faculty profiles from the directory, you have to Google them), campus map, etc.

[marshwiggle]

At my university, the faculty/staff website is password protected. It's a little creepy since that means access to anything that they remotely consider "employee-specific" is trackable.

[glowdart]

A few of my summer tasks include finding faculty and staff at comparator schools. Some of our colleagues at those schools are not getting invited for professional development opportunities, external tenure reviewer opportunities, and conferences because I cannot figure out who they are, where they are, and if they have full-time faculty in the discipline