March Madness Really Starts in November

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I bet you didn’t know that today officially marks the start of the college basketball season. With most of the attention in the sports world focused on football right now, it tends to get overshadowed, and it usually stays that way until the Super Bowl is over in early February.

So I thought I would give it some attention in my own way – by going through the list of top 25 ranked college basketball teams and taking a quick peak at each school’s website.

Why college basketball, you might be asking? Partially because I’m a college basketball fan, but more so because on the college level, there is a greater variety of website designs to look at than on the professional levels.

Some of the websites were not what I had expected at all. All of the schools on this list are major, world-renowned, brand-name universities. Yet from a design and usability perspective, some of them had absolutely awful websites. There’s no getting around it – that’s just what they are.

I won’t tell you what my favorites were, or which ones I liked the least, but you’ll probably be able to tell what I was thinking just by looking through the images below.

2008 Top 25 College Basketball Teams (Pre-season)

1. University of North Carolina

2. University of Connecticut

3. Louisville

4. UCLA

5. Duke

6. Pittsburgh

7. Michigan State

8. Texas

9. Notre Dame

10. Purdue

11. Gonzaga

12. Memphis

13. Tennessee

14. Oklahoma

15. Arizona State

16. University of Miami (Florida)

17. Marquette

18. Georgetown

19. University of Florida

20. Davidson

21. USC

22. Wisconsin

23. Kansas

24. Wake Forest

25. Villanova

Honorable Mentions

I would be remiss if I didn’t include these schools, all of which are near and dear to my immediate family. My favorite of the bunch by far is the first one – but then again, it is my alma mater, so of course I’m going to choose it!

Binghamton

University at Albany

Cornell

Siena College

Vanderbilt

Thoughts?

Now that you’ve seen them for yourself, which ones do you like and dislike? Is your alma mater’s better? Feel free to comment below and share with everyone!

4 Comments

1. 

   Reply

   Ezra wrote on November 10, 2008:

   Great idea for an article!

   In the spirit of rankings, here are my top 5 websites:

   1. Purdue
   2. Louisville
   3. Notre Dame
   4. Davidson
   5. UNC (interesting how they go with a very non-graphic intensive homepage. very simple but easy to find what you’re looking for. the rest of their website, not so much.)

   And my bottom 5:

   1. Duke (seriously? empty white space taking up over 50% of your screen with a tiny search box in the middle? someone thought this was a good idea? i thought dukies were smart.)
   2. Pitt (ugly and not at all intuitive. pass the microscope)
   3. UCLA
   4. Wake Forest
   5. Kansas (major deduction for putting links alphabetically by letter on the homepage)

   Honorable Mention: Florida (because on initial glance it looked to me like one of those paid search pages you land on by accident when you mistype a URL. a big school like U of F should be able to do better than that.)

   Posted at 11:24 am

   • 

     Reply

     Addicott Web wrote on November 10, 2008:

     You nailed all of the ones that I liked the least… it’s funny how I was thinking a lot of what you said about those sites too.

     Of all the schools, Duke’s was the most surprising. But I guess just because students at those schools are smart doesn’t mean their websites are good – see Harvard’s website as another example of that!

     My favorite was actually Tennessee’s, with Purdue’s as a slight second, but only because I thought the font size was a bit too large.

     Posted at 11:52 am

2. 

   Reply

   Ezra wrote on November 10, 2008:

   You’re right about Harvard – especially the ugly olive(?) background, it’s not even in their school colors.

   Another example is my alma mater – Columbia. The first thing that annoys me is that typing columbia.edu has a 6-second delay before redirecting you to http://www.columbia.edu. That should be instantaneous, not on a delay. In fact, it used to not even redirect to the actual homepage! I can’t think of another major site off the top of my head where leaving out the www gets you an error message.

   And the current layout is at least functional, if boring. When I went there it was one of the worst sites on the web (in my opinion)–

   This was the design from 1997-2000 and from 2000-2005.

   Posted at 1:10 pm

   • 

     Reply

     Addicott Web wrote on November 10, 2008:

     Oh wow, that’s a neat site, I’d never heard of it before… with some of the websites above, I can only wonder what previous versions looked like, considering the state of the current ones!

     I totally agree about Columbia’s previous versions, they were pretty bad, but then again, most websites weren’t that spectacular in retrospect. Binghamton’s website when I graduated wasn’t much better. Incidentally, they kept making do with the old design until just earlier this year, when they launched the new site pictured above.

     Re: the delay when typing in the URL without the “www” – I think it all depends on the website. Some are quicker than others, but I’m sure how modern the coding and structure of the website are impact how long it takes to load in a big way.

     Posted at 1:44 pm

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