Students using the Dartmouth College webpage during the last week have been in for a surprise -- the site was entirely revamped last Friday, presenting a dramatically different faade and some new features.
The front page has been redesigned to include Dartmouth current events as well as various search options. Links have also changed as some areas of the site that were previously separate have been combined.
According to Spokesman for Computing Services Bill Brawley the site was changed to allow for more information to be presented on the front page and also to make navigation easier.
"The site hadn't been changed in a number of years," explained Brawley. "There was a sense that we need to make improvements. We were having a hard time sharing information [on the main page]."
Brawley said the project took a web design team about six months to complete. Computing Services worked in conjunction with the Office of Admissions, the Department of Public Affairs and the President's Office.
While Brawley said his department has received feed back "spanning the continuum" from positive to negative, all students who spoke with The Dartmouth said they did not like the new design.
"The old design was much more attractive," said Doug Fenton '02. "It was much simpler and had a more classy look."
Rose Kraemer '02 agreed. "Visually it's not appealing," she said. "It doesn't give a good pictorial representation of what the College looks like."
Sarah Donahue '02 said she felt that the fonts on the site were somewhat discontinuous and that she did not like the prominence of the "Dartmouth Happenings."
"The 'Dartmouth Happenings' section could be smaller and I think people would still read it," she said.
Brawley, however, said that Computing Services expected some complaints going into the project.
"We knew going in that the page we were changing was much loved by everyone," he said. "It represented us well. There was no way that we could make changes to that design and not really shock people."
Several students also said they missed the feature photos that used to appear on the website. "I really liked the big pictures that came up on the old site," Donahue said.
Such items as the popular feature were eliminated on the new version. Brawley said that these design preferences were taken into account, however the size and complexity of these photos did not allow them to be included on the new page.
Some students also said the new site seemed to take more time than the previous site to load, however Brawley said this may not actually be the case.
"The old site had one large image," he said. "The new site has a series of smaller images, so users can use the page while these images are loading." He added that pages with several, smaller images are more efficient than sites with only one large image.
Brawley also said there have been very few problems with the site with the exception of a few links that were not carried over from the previous version.
He added that there were some initial problems with the page's appearance because of differences between Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, however these conflicts have been resolved.
