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.

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.

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.

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.)