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Assignment #10
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Www.gocollege.com was a pretty good site and I consider it to be usable, although, there is definately room for design improvement. The site contains a lot of information, many resources, and a reasonably good color scheme, but the main page is far too cluttered, containing distracting ads and and cluttered frames. The home page is the first thing a person will see, and this one gives the site the impression of an attempt at very good design, but just seems to fall short with all the flashing ads and the hard-to-find scroll.
Thus, its basic design could use some improvement. In my opinion, the frame on the far right should be eliminated entirely and the center one expanded. The "features" folder, obscurely placed at the bottom of the middle frame, should definately either be placed at the top of the frame or be listed in the frame to the left. Some good examples of the type of design I'm referring to are the Student Section of www.flvs.net and the Mail part of www.yahoo.com.
As many of the ads should be removed as possible. If this is not an option, they should at least be relocated to a part of the page that does not interfere with its organization and purpose. Also, there should be a clear separation between the frames.
On other pages in the site, things become much less cluttered and are reasonably nice-looking, though a style improvement of putting another space or two between the links listed at the top would be a good design practice.
As far as the scholarship search program itself, I found the forms tedious, and because of them, would not be eager to return to the site. Also, there were some inconsistancies (i.e. the form informs you that you may chose a maximum of 3 options, but does not allow you to do so). When the results show up, they don't seem to be incredibily organized, and most don't contain important information (like how much the scholarship is for). Again, I believe a good option for this problem would be to either organized these well on the page, or have the frame to the left give the results (must like an Internet Explorer search engine) and have one be able to click on them to view information on it.
This site had excellent links and resources, and was a reasonably good site, but could use some basic design improvement to improve its appeal and usability.
In searching the scholarship database, I found only one or two scholarships that I would consider applying for. However, there are many other sites for scholarships that are much more appealing, and if it were not for the shear number of entries in this database, I would not even consider returning.