Why would anyone want to visit the Herberger Institute website? First of all, the website provides information about the arts college at Arizona State University for interested students. The website is the only place you can go to find specific information. The layout of the site is very appealing to the eye. The pictures on the website are very appropriate for the topics they cover. It is a very easy site to manage. Although, just as anything this website has it’s flaws, too. The Herberger Institute Website is effective because of its graphics, functionality, and content.
Since the Herberger Institute website is a university funded website, the content is excellent and reliable. The site provides all of the information you need from the various degrees offered in the college, from upcoming events, to information about the faculty and staff, and of course information on applying to the college. The Herberger Institute website does have an education domain which proves that the information is scholarly and reliable.
All of the content included on the website is factual and informative while remaining compact enough to fit on one page. Not all of the information is just on one page, but topic and link is just one page, enough to provide you with the information you need. The website does not fluff up the information with opinions and unnecessary information. Since the Herberger is an art institute, the website does a wonderful job of representing all of the art focuses provided by the college and providing enough information about them. Each art focus has its own tab on the homepage making it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for. This is very helpful because there are more than forty-five undergraduate degrees and seventy graduate degrees. If all of the art focuses were compact into one group of information it would be very hard to find what you were looking for. Content is a very important part of a website, and the Herberger Institute website has great content.
However, some of the information on the website is outdated. The website provides information about events from a few years ago, not just the past year. Because this is a website for the arts, having information on events that is more than a few years old can be troublesome and agitating. People who do not come on campus everyday may be mislead by this information and miss an important event they may have wanted to attend. Also, outdated information is not helpful when research needs to be done. If someone was to use the site for an assignment, they would not have very current information. The Herberger Institute does provide a link at the very bottom of the page if you notice outdated information and wanted to update it. While this is a very useful tool it is not helpful for people who do not know whether information is outdated or not. Even though there is very little outdated content it is still not a positive reflection on the website.
Websites that provide a lot of information need to have a place where people can search for something specific. The Herberger Institute website has a search bar right at the top of the page, making it easy to type in a word and find exactly what you are looking for. The search is scholarly, meaning the results will most likely come from within the college or university and the results are trustworthy. The website also gives you ways to organize the found results, either by relevance or by date, which is important when you are looking for something such as an article, the date is important. If you still have not found quite what you are looking for there are links for search tips or an advanced search right next to the search bar. You can choose specific phrases to search or choose only specific websites to come up in the search with those tools. Searching is made easy on the Herberger Institute website.
In some places where the website is trying to be helpful, it is actually blocking some information. On a few of the pages that you are directed to there is a search engine specifically for events. This tool seems very useful since it proclaims that there are over seven hundred events each year. The only downfall to this tool is that as you scroll down the page the search engine follows, resulting in blocked information and links. The search engine following is as troublesome as the ads on cheaper websites that follow you throughout the page and pop up everywhere. The intention of the website probably was not to trouble people who visit it. It is most likely a programing issue that can be easily fixed. Bothersome tools on websites can turn away people who are viewing the site.
The way a website looks is a very important factor in how good of a website it is. The graphics and layout of the Herberger Institute website are very appealing, appropriate, and make the website easy to navigate. The colors of the background bring attention to certain parts of the website that are more important, such as the various art focuses have a black background, different than any other color on the page. Sometimes, the pictures sometimes are very busy, they have a lot of color and animation to them. The black background balances out the pictures to make them appealing to the eye and not overwhelming. The top of the page has the Arizona State University colors, maroon and gold, to show that the website is affiliated with the university and showing you where you can go for more broad information about the school instead of colleges within the university. Overall, the website does a good job with the graphics.
Unlike other websites, all the pictures on the Herberger Institute Website have a purpose. Also, they are real pictures of the institute and the programs or events they offer. Several pictures come across the screen each showing a different part of the college. Each picture has a dominant color that making you more likely to pay attention and click on the picture to find out more. This is very helpful when exploring the website, because some for users it is their first time visiting the website and they may not know exactly what it is they are looking for. The layout is very great. Everything on the page is very organized, making things easy to see and find. There are tabs at the top of the page that have one of each of the art focuses on it; if you click on one of them you are redirected to a new page with the same layout as the home page and it provides you with more information about whichever focus you chose. There are smaller sized tabs under the art focus that go over information about the institute as a whole. Of course, there is a search bar at the top if you do not want to go through pages of information and know exactly what you are looking for. You can even choose to search within the Herberger Institute or all of Arizona State University. While the website provides various graphics and links and tabs, it is not an overload due in part to the impeccable organization. The look of the Herberger Institute website is very clean and straightforward while still seeming very appealing.
While the graphics may be visually appealing, they are not the most helpful. One thing that was bothersome about the Herberger Institute website was that the graphics work more like a slideshow, forcing you to watch all of them pass through the screen. It is presented as a slideshow but, there is the option to click through the graphics. Even though the graphics do have click through links connected to it one would not know that at first. It seems that you have to wait a few seconds until a link pops up. The link is in a small font and a color that is not easily distinguishable from the graphic. Having one or the other, a click through link on the graphic or a link at the bottom, would make the graphics a little less confusing and it would actually mean less work for the programmer of the site. The graphic/link situation is just one very small complaint about the site, and it is not much of a hindrance.
The Herberger Institute website may only cover certain information, however the site may be worth looking at just for its beauty. Some of the pictures and graphics may be overwhelming to some, but they are all appropriate for the subject of the website. This website is short and to the point, and will not take long to navigate. If you aren’t able to find that particular thing you are looking there is always the search bar. The website comes very close to perfect.
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