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Apple's big advantage over us, though, is that they're trying to sell a product and can specifically emphasize whatever their latest and greatest product is using the large center portion of their site; unfortunately, it's awfully tough to put a college degree in a nice shrinkwrapped area and say "here, buy this". Our site is spread out to provide greater focus on what research said people used our page for most – quick information about the institution and very specific, targeted items used frequently by students, faculty, and staff. Other approaches drowned site users with too much information or too many options and drove them away, usually to Google which deep-linked them to the areas they wanted to find anyways. ---- Jack Kramer Manager of Information Technology University Relations, Michigan State University w: 517-884-1231 / c: 248-635-4955 From: Laurence Bates <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2011 14:02:22 -0400 To: University Relations <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> Subject: RE: [MSUNAG] MSU web sites in context It is interesting to view sites in terms of their attempts at branding. Apple has refined a capacity to say more with less that works very well for them both in their products and their web page. The BBC example on the bottom right is an example of a disturbing trend to sell the upper portion of web pages to advertisers. Laurence ________________________________ From: Kramer, Jack [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Wednesday, August 03, 2011 12:17 PM To: Laurence Bates; [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] MSU web sites in context Looking at these sites I'm happy to see that most of them have adopted at least some of the current brand standards – we're presenting a much more cohesive look to the Web than we used to which is great for the institution as a whole. I know that somewhere around here we have a bunch of research that University Relations commissioned in regards to the homepage design and the site standard that's based off ofthat and , if I recall correctly, the research pointed to the green top of page bar as a good way to convey the MSU Green branding while still allowing white space usage on the rest of the page. On the MSU homepage it also draws the eye immediately to the navigation placed at the top which helps site users get to their commonly used resources quickly. Apple's site is a good example of this principle – they don't go quite as bold as we do, but the contrasting color versus the rest of the page makes it very simple to pick out the important navigation elements at speed. ---- Jack Kramer Manager of Information Technology University Relations, Michigan State University w: 517-884-1231 / c: 248-635-4955 From: Laurence Bates <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> Reply-To: Laurence Bates <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2011 10:15:11 -0400 To: "[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>" <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> Subject: [MSUNAG] MSU web sites in context After resetting some Ethernet switches this morning, Ichecked the websites of MSU colleges and was interested to see the different styles used in context with each other and with notable web sites such as Apple, Microsoft, the New York Times and the BBC. They all look great and your mileage may vary of course but the take-away for me was that the siteswith the MSU green header seem to be rather top heavy. Sorry if that was your toe that I just stepped on, especially since I really like the gentle leadership that the MSU web team has provided in recent years, but enough $0.02 can buy a small coffee. Food for thought… Laurence Bates [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://www.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://www.canr.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://www.cal.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://cas.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://www.educ.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://broad.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://www.egr.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://honorscollege.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://humanmedicine.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://jmc.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://www.law.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://www.lymanbriggs.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://www.music.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://www.ns.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://nursing.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://www.com.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://rcah.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://www.socialscience.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://www.msu.edu/~uud/main.html> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://cvm.msu.edu/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://www.apple.com/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://www.nytimes.com/> [cid:[log in to unmask]]<http://www.bbc.com/> Laurence A. Bates College of Education Michigan State University 217E Erickson Hall East Lansing MI 48824 517-355-2178 [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> An exuberant rationalist...