If there’s on thing that the Cornell redesign team got right, it was their iron-fisted approach to layout. “Thy shalt not bend our banners, colors, and pixels,” said Diane Kubarik. The reason for this is immediately apparent if you happen to visit another educational website, such as www.swarthmore.edu and then move a level deeper to www.swarthmore.edu/visitors/, where you see two completely different presentations:

“Am I still on the swarthmore web page anymore?” you wonder. “Maybe some hackers have hijacked my browser and are trying to get my secret login information.” Then, you leave for cornell.edu and www.cornell.edu/visiting/, where you are amazed to see:

Note that I don’t mean to pick on Swarthmore in particular–I just happened to notice this problem on their site. I’m sure plenty of other .edu sites do the same thing. However, we at Cornell can be proud that our web site presents a unified public image. Something that says “We are Cornell,” rather than, “We might be big-shot university XYZ, but we’re not really sure.”

2 Responses to “Consistency a big win for Cornell.edu”

1. Bill Steele says:

   7/29/2005 at 10:15 am

   I think you’re pushing it to say that changing the color of the banner is an inconsistency. It seems to be a deliberate choice, perhaps even means something to them. Something like the color of Star Trek uniforms.

   They are also quite consistent in using bold type only for the site you’re on after you leave the front page.

   They do break down when you get to some departments. Probably a general makeover that hasn’t propgated through the whole school. Same thing is happening here at Cornell.

   Reply
2. Elliott Back says:

   9/30/2007 at 2:06 pm

   These things definitely take time to get in place, especially when there are university webpages out there that are basically orphaned; perhaps useful, but nobody is maintaining them.

   Reply