Does this Web site work? School of Health Management of the A.T. Still University of Health Sciences - www.shm-kcom.edu - First Click

University Business, Jan, 2003 by Nicole Rivard

BEST FEATURES

* Overall, the site is fairly user-friendly. The menus are easy to follow and the site index is clear and concise. The layout allows for easy reading.

* The site contains nuggets of great information, allowing faculty and current/prospective students access to information that is either difficult to locate, in various publications, or otherwise unavailable. Unfortunately, sometimes the information is buried and in the wrong place.

* The orientation to the online courses, under the "Demo Courses" link, is strong. Once you've logged in, however, it's a little tricky to get back to the main SHM page.

* Kudos to the school's powerful, well-crafted mission statement--one of the clearest I've seen. But it should be on the home page; currently, the home page leaves visitors wondering what the school is all about.

* The student-profile features, under the "Why SHM?" link, are a plus. What would make this section even stronger is adding more information to these stories. For example, messages regarding faculty quality, class sizes, student body profiles, etc.

* The "Is Online Learning for Me?" quiz is a good idea. But the school needs to clarify for prospective students whether or not it offers any campus-based programs or classes.

* The "Contact Us" link is chock-full of information regarding all of the important college divisions--complete with street addresses, phone/fax numbers, and e-mail addresses. Faculty members are accessible because the site provides their e-mail addresses.

* Many common questions can be answered 24/7 thanks to the FAQs page, a great feature for prospective and current students. The "Technical Requirements" page is also a good tool for prospective students.

NEEDS WORK

* There is no immediate sense of the institution that houses this particular school. Is A.T. Still University of Health Sciences really willing to subvert its position in the marketplace to the online school?

* There seems to be little rhyme or reason to the site plan. The design grid doesn't offer any natural points of entry or interest.

* There is no clear visual hierarchy of links.

* The site is text-heavy. Aside from the home and "Welcome" pages, the site is apparently devoid of any photographs, illustrations, or graphic embellishment.

* Previewing the site on a Macintosh, the text (size 2 Verdana, a font that reads well even at size 1) appears much too large. Knowing that type appears 25 percent larger on a PC, this could present problems, and require more scrolling than necessary.

* The home page needs to be more appealing to the eye. In particular, the color scheme is blah. While the school's focus is the health industry, the overall color scheme (white, gray, blue, tan) is low in color saturation, appearing cold and somewhat sterile.

* The Web site utilizes frame-based pages, which allow the browser window to be divided into multiple sections--in this case three. Although this allows for features such as a stationary header or a navigation bar, frame-based pages are not supported by all browsers, and search engines often ignore frame-based pages. This may be why the gray sidebar running along the left-hand side of the page sometimes appears blank upon entering the site. It also may be why many pages are unprintable from some browsers.

* Drop-down menus are inherently problematic, displaying differently from browser to browser and from platform to platform. Nested submenus within the drop-down menus get confusing.

* A site visitor unfamiliar with the college divisions or the site structure has to travel too far to get to nested drop-down paths such as "Course Information," "Graduate Students," etc.

* I had difficulty locating "Admissions" from the home page and actually had to conduct a site search for it. Admissions for prospective students turned out to be the lost listing (of 10) on the search results page! When I clicked on it, I was actually taken to a neatly organized page of links, but it was buried.

* The school missed an opportunity to highlight a wonderful idea, the "Tuition-Free" Educational Investment Opportunity. SHM offers prospective students the opportunity to enroll in one tuition-free e-learning course, to "take the first step" toward a master's degree or graduate certificate. Why isn't this terrific marketing tool on the home page, grabbing site visitors?

* On the home page, the meaning of the yellow sunburst sporting "Educational Certificate Holder" is unclear. When you click the link you eventually learn that there is an interesting opportunity for an educational certificate holder, but that isn't immediately apparent.

* The faculty page linked to "Why SHM?" needs more enticing details. There aren't enough details about student life at the school, either.

* The "Site Search" link is a smart feature for any site, but this one requires an additional click to get to the search feature.

* The "Weather Ticker" feature is extraneous on a higher ed site.

SUGGESTIONS

* Since the school is promoting online education, it should look edgier. Just because the primary market is comprised of adults doesn't mean that a conservative approach is the best way to attract new visitors to the site.