Posted by Trying to help my son find his D1 wrestling campus had me strolling through many different universities sites. Wyoming caught my eye. The University of Wyoming is a place that my son didn’t enroll, but the creative hick style, brings the visitor to look beyond the homepage. Large icons at the bottom help give those quick links a catch, or the inviting images that actually play video to capture the quick seconds of auto scroll in the banner of the page. Simple top navigation or bottom icons to navigate to the next topic of choice. Clarity for finding topics without having to click your life away. The bookmark that hangs down on every page to “Apply Now” has the quick link so you don’t have to go find your page, if at any moment that trigger’s the thought to apply. What is interesting is the WyoWeb page that has both icons and navigation topics such as calendars, Facebook, records and lots more to find those quick links. The design layout is easy to navigate and helps with the eyes when scrolling fast.
Your comment about the “creative hick style” made me chuckle. The design of the UWyo homepage is attractive to my eye as well. It is uncluttered, which is a hard thing to achieve with a university website. Their portal (the page you took a screenshot of) is really organized as well. There is a good deal of information available from the portal page, but the consistent alignment of the columns and the judicious use of whitespace really makes the portal page easy to scan.
One of the things I like most about the site is that the “Apply Now” flag is easily accessible from most of the pages on the site. I like that they have committed to that as their call to action and communicated it very clearly.