Interesting Navigation

I found their navigation also very interesting — I very much like that have their constituency (audience) segments pre-loaded and clickable horizontally directly below the logo/header. But what is very interesting (and read here, skeptical about) is that if you click “about” for example, that row of links becomes the breadcrumbs, and the navigation actually jumps down the page a good bit, below the happy horizontal photo.

In the way that this have been organized, they are definitely breaking away from the tight-to-top navigation — the logo header is very tall by most standards, followed by an equally tall image segment — I wonder if that’s all too much?

But that’s my only concern about the design. They use a flex-width design; there is almost perfect semantic HTML, all xHTML/CSS of course, and the design has elements of modern style, without being too hip, so that they would have to change it in a year or two, to not look out-of-date.

One final FYI: The firm that helped Haverford with this redesign is White Whale, a firm I’d be interested in seeing respond to our coming redesign RFI, and I’ve received a report from a member of Haverford’s web team that expressed how positive the experience of working with them was.

Just to confirm that I really like the way the seach feature breaks information down. Especially the “people” section. It’s lovely to see the email without having to navigate, and a single click gets you to the faculty page. The cross-over of the directory results (blue column) and student/faculty profiles (pink) gives you more navigation options without feeling redundant.

The Haverford divided SEARCH results is indeed a great feature! It is very helpful, functional. However, once you use it to start poking around their site you do see that beyond the central administrative and dictionary-type definition pages, the pages for the individual organizations and departments are all different and confusing. It makes me realize one of the brilliant parts of Trillium has been giving L&C sites consistency.

Also, has everyone see Brown’s site at http://brown.edu/ ? They have a different navigation approach. It is like file folders.

I do like the segmentation concept that Brown uses, but personally find their execution as a little too complex. (The page is hard to absorb quickly, in a very “Don’t Make Me Think” way — I’m not entirely wedded to Krug’s mandates, but do use them to some extent.)

I prefer Boston University’s execution a little more — less segments and more readable. Notre Dame has also used the same concept — although I’d expect that ND’s style of execution to be more at home on an Athletics site that a university home page.

Thanks for bringing this up Morgan — I think self-segmentation by the audience member an important method to deliver more content on the home page while providing more functionality to the end user.