Visual Review of Websites of the World's Most Prestigious Universities

As the electronic and internet communication grows, the need for designing websites for universities also has become more apparent, and attracting users to these websites and passing information through them has become to be one of these organizations’ primary goals. This research aims to find criteria for designing websites of successful universities in the world. In web design – as in graphic design in general – many visual elements are involved, such as color, contrast, size, texture, etc. Establishing standards for designing the aforementioned elements, aside from improving the visual presence, can be useful for communicating with users and persuading them to visit the website more often. One way to achieve this goal is studying and analyzing some of the successful university websites in the world, as they have already accomplished establishing such models for successful communication and interaction with their users. This study is an applied research and uses qualitative and semiquantitative methods for data gathering and analyzing. Target population of this study is all of the university websites on the World Wide Web. Totally, 53 websites from different universities in the world have been selected based on their scientific and website rankings from THE and Webmetrics databases. A few art universities and faculties were added to the list later on in the process, as in THE and Webmetrics, art universities or faculties are not listed separately, and it was expected that these universities or faculties to have more focus on design. Their selection then was based on their ranking among art universities. Then, using a custom checklist, the visual characteristics of their main pages have been analyzed. Four main variables in this checklist include: type, color, multimedia and composition, and they have been analyzed with some questions in details. For the purpose of this study, these websites’ technical characteristics have not been taken into account as well as their contents. These websites were checked in Google Chrome browser running on a Windows 7 Operating System. The results show that successful websites share common visual characteristics. Some of these characteristics include: using sans serif fonts; not using stroke andunderline for titles; one or two different typefaces for text; achieving visual diversity by using different font sizes, weights or decorations like bold, light or italic; white or bright colors for page background; avoiding photo or texture for page background; color contrast between text and their backgroundcolor; similarity of typefaces amongst links and other texts; distinguishing links with color, underlining and their position; ordering links in normal pop-up menus; 2-dimensional rectangular design for buttons; using default shape for mouse and scroll bars; using slideshow and not using music or soundeffects for pages; placing logo on top-left; dividing the main content to three or four column; using one to three photos in homepage; using headers, text and news links as positive and main links as negative;following the same design pattern of the homepage in other pages regarding color, composition and showing in different tabs.