My first impression of the new design for our university website was negative. I thought it looked like a sports news channel. (Thanks to Wayback Machine, here’s a snapshot of how the home page looked five years ago.)
My second impression (I’ve been living with it for a week now) is much more positive. I think it’s a brilliant innovation to turn a university in the direction of YouTube. Not just sports, but news and teaching can be delivered by video, and it’s a medium designed to appeal to young people.
I’ve also taken a look at the Quarkbase results to view a dashboard of data on this website. Unfortunately, Quarkbase will only search for top level domains (eg typepad.com), not subsidiary sites (such as prstudies.typepad.com) so it’s not best suited for blog monitoring.
I think it looks quite good, it certainly is an improvement on the previous one and is a step in the right direction by incorporating Youtube and social networking sites.