Chris Bowles asked me what I thought about the new design for the University’s home page, and I decided to post my thoughts here.

If you want to get technical, it does a pretty good job on the XKCD test—the only thing I couldn’t find relatively easily was the University police phone number. But it clearly follows the letter rather than the spirit of that cartoon: the big, eye-catching stuff is still about “branding” rather than helping the visitor find what they’re looking for. I’m not saying branding isn’t important, but I’m sure for the vast majority of the people coming to the web site it just gets in their way.

Also, I thought I’d mention that the layout is a bit broken when I view the page in Safari (the browser I use most.) I think this is because I’ve set the preferences to “never use font sizes smaller than 12.” Why do page designers love small fonts so much?