You are a student at Tuskegee University and have been chosen for a web analysis project. The Division of Student Affairs (DSA) is revising the Career Services website during Summer 2014. You have been directed to select a portion of Tuskegee University’s website, determine how effective it is, and then make specific recommendations to the website manager, Garrett Ashley, for improving the site.

What portion of TU’s website will you look at? I do think you should try to remain focused on a single portion/department of the site, since each department generally designs their own page. I recommend focusing on either the home page, the admissions and aid page, or your major’s current departmental page; however, if you want to branch out and do a general sweep (and pretend this is all designed with unity in mind), that’s fine, but that might be more work in the long run.

Please make sure you can back up your recommendations with evidence. Concrete ideas for improving the site are necessary for explaining what exactly we are doing well, and what we can improve upon. One necessary step you will need to take with this assignment is to compare TU’s website with others: in this case, we’ll use  and websites for comparison.

You’ll write your report to me (Garrett Ashley) as if I am the real website manager for TU, and as such you will address me at the beginning of the analysis. The analysis will hypothetically affect the future design of TU’s website. As you are working on your analysis and recommendations, always keep in mind that you are writing for a real audience and purpose. Here are some things that’ll be important to bring forward to your audience:

What do you feel is the overall design philosophy/principles of this website? Is it immediately clear? Do you feel the website is going in the right direction, say, when compared to other university websites?

Specifics: What do you think of the overall design of a page? The colors? The graphics and images? The use of text vs image? What about the links/buttons? Is everything organized in a reasonable way? What’s missing from the page?

Think of some of the more basic rhetorical issues that’ll come up, to: who is the audience of the website? Is the website, in general, accessible to the audience? Easy/difficult to navigate? What does the website offer, and what should it do differently?

Again, one great way to make recommendations is to explain what works for other similar websites.