As a freshman online design project, Hopkins' Web site might eke out an A minus. As the public face of one of the country's leading research institutions, it falls well short of where it needs to be.
The home page of any university's Web site serves many roles. It's a face to the public. It's the first place prospective students go to find more information on the school. It's the place where the college posts its latest news. It's the doorway to easy access to department pages, visitor information and more.
Considering the importance of the home page, it's surprising that Hopkins' is so boring and static. The Hopkins Web site is painfully basic, and this unprofessional format is undoubtedly hurting the public's perception of our school.
The Hopkins page is anchored by a single, unchanging image: the Gilman clock tower framed by a blue sky. On the right side of the page, visitors find occasionally changing text links to updates and news. The left side of the page hosts a menu with links to various parts of the site. Our "Headlines at Hopkins" site, to which the news links on the home page direct users, is even more basic-looking than the home page itself.
Look at Hopkins' site alongside those of peer institutions such as Cornell, Vanderbilt and Georgetown, and the graphical difference alone smacks you right in the face. Nearly every major university Web site has a news-related image on the front page, with a link leading to a related story. Announcements are presented in an interesting graphic format rather than in plain text (as the Hopkins site does). Further, there are image links on many other college sites that link directly to virtual tours of campus.
The problems with our site aren't just visual, though. Our search function is virtually useless, often returning completely irrelevant results. Many of the links on the site are completely outdated and refer to pages that no longer exist. Worst of all, those pages that do exist are not well integrated. Navigation on the Hopkins Web site is a nightmare of Homeric proportions.
If we have a dinky Web site, we're going to be viewed that way as a University. Hopkins should take immediate steps to revamp its Web content. The most important step is to increase the graphic interest of the home page. Further, the University should capitalize on one of its strengths -- the physical beauty of the Homewood and medical campuses -- by including images of these places on the home page with links to more pictures and online tours.
Fortunately, the new Hopkins Web portal will allay some of the deeper problems, particularly with organization and dead links. This new portal will organize important announcements and information, including weather and class information, in an easy-to-use format. However, the portal is designed predominantly for current members of the Hopkins community, and it acts more as a stand-in for a lackluster home page than anything else. This new system will help students, but only by steering them past our awful home page. It won't affect the home page itself.
The University should hire an outside design firm to revamp our Web content, both visually and organizationally. We need a dynamic page, one that will leave visitors wowed rather than non-plussed. Given the resources we pour into improving our image for visitors and prospective students, it does our University a great disservice that we stick with an obviously outdated and uninteresting Web site.
In this day, an institution's Internet presence is its face to the world. Right now, our Web presence is stuck in the 1990s.
--Joshua Robinson is a junior International Studies major from Potomac, Md.
