Well today I am going to talk about university websites in Pakistan. Today I am going to look at websites for three top (from my view) universities in Pakistan: NED University, FAST NU and LUMS.
Before I start here are some screenshots of all three:
OK this is where I have a problem: all of these sites look like a 12 year old designed them! Don’t get me wrong, I know a lot of talented designers in Pakistan and being a university in this day and age, your site does matter.
I spent 30 minutes on each site to find some information and at the end just gave up. The amount of grammatical errors, visual errors and layout issues just turned me off completely.
There are so many things that I want to change on these sites that it will take me forever to list them all there. I will be doing a separate post for each of the site in coming days. BUT I also wanted to take this chance to openly challenge the talented designer in Pakistan to come forward and create a mock-frontpage for any one of these universities. Are you up for the challenge?
These sites are awful! And there’s no excuse when there are so many fantastic university sites to use as reference and inspiration. A quick list of some of my favourite university sites:
imperial.ac.uk … Fresh, inviting.
uwaterloo.ca … My alma mater. I’m biased
kaust.edu.sa … Clean, simple.
mtholyoke.edu … All about people.
mit.edu … Innovative, evolving, fun!
yorku.ca … Bold, unconventional.
stanford.edu … Classic, cultured.
What’s nice about these sites is that they reflect the personality of the institution. Now, it’s okay for our universities to create a version one and get it slightly wrong. What leaves me dumbfounded is that the version ones are just not updated/upgraded and then one fine day they’ll go and have it redeveloped from scratch and it’s the same story all over again.
It’s sad, but when they’re not interested in correcting basic content and layout errors it’s unlikely that they’ll realize the benefits of having a great website.
Mahmood, I couldn’t have said it any better. These websites is what gives their potential students a first impression. What bothers me is that i am sure that there are so many students from these very universities who would love to redesign the site.. a small competition would produce excellent results.
Obaid I think the FAST website is a zillion years old…
Chck out the FAST Karachi campus website and include that site’s analysis on this post.
http://www.khi.nu.edu.pk
Thanks
Talha