Poor Layout and Design on university website

While searching for the most suitable university, many people visit the school's websites to look for information. Consequently, the layout and design should be readable and user friendly. The Florida International University website does not do this. (www.fiu.edu)

The website does not separate the information into a few categories. Instead, there is a very long list of categories on the left hand side in no particular sequence. For example, "Tuition and Fees" is at the end of the list, while "Arts and Culture" is in the beginning. Frequent viewers of this website might be more interested in looking at the Tuition link then the Arts link. This makes it very hard for the viewer to find what they are looking for in a timely manner. In order to make the site more user friendly, there could be links to the most frequently used pages such as Admissions, Registration, Tuition, and Webmail.

Aside from this, there are many links for recent news at the university. Instead of listing so many headlines, the most important and recent news should be listed alongside a link to view more news articles. This will also make the web page easier to read. Taking some of the words of the page will increase the amount of white space and increase the readability.

The only redeeming feature might have been the search box. This does not even work to its full potential because its search results are not always related. A more advanced search that uses more than keywords might give more specific results.