Greatly Reviewed!

One good thing about Bandung Institute of Technology’s website is its being pragmatically beautiful. There’s no such design that offers us “beauty”. All are made on the basis of use. For example, instead of putting seven bars of menus, it shows seven boxes with active submenus surrounding the main text area. With this, we don’t need to point one menu and wait for quarter of a second or so to let the submenus pop up and click it; we just have to head to the active submenus available and then click it. That’s it. Most of the things there are presented so as to make it easiest for you to use it.

Another thing that needs mentioning is the marvelous digital library management. You see, you can go to its library, head to the thesis section and select certain years, certain major, or so, and you can find as many titles of thesis as the campus has and then you can read their abstracts. To this date, this is the most open hearted digital library in Indonesia. I’m sure it makes it easy for students to search for the availability of certain topics and then when the available abstracts do suit to their needs, then they can go to the library to really borrow the thesis.

The two strongest point of Bandung Institute of Technology’s website.

First of all, congratulations to UGM’s website builder team! You rock, bro! There’s quite a lot of things that makes their site look cooler among other Indonesian universities’ sites. Let me just count them.

First, the site is somewhat light to access. Their page size is generally very small. Yet, there’s a price for anything. That is… very simple design. In terms of design, I believe this site’s design is much better (don’t compare to this site, it’s way much better, look at it’s Indonesianly classic design, batik, batik, batik–it’s the ideal Indonesian site, IMHO).

Second, its subdomains vary in terms of CMS, sitemapping and designs. Some uses wordpress, some uses home-made wordpress-like CMS, some are half-static, and so on. Well, I do believe visitors will find it quite cozy browsing through this university’s site.

Third, its subdomains (offices’, faculties’, department’s, services’ sites, etc) are very well-updated, thanks to the wordpress-like CMS, I guess. Faculties’, Departments’, offices’, and centers’ staffs can easily update their homepage once they need to do it.

Fourth, as webometrics urges, this site’s rich files are quite a lot, which means they have a huge desire to propagate knowledge to all people in the world regardless walks of life. This boosts their webometrics score.

I think that’s all about UGM’s site. Tomorrow, you’ll find me with another university’s site to review. Which university will it be? Just guess, :D.

Well, I just changed my mind. I’m not gonna start with the highest-achiever in webometrics. I’ll start from the most respectable university, at least in my opinion (this decision is subject to whimsical changes, hehehe).University of Indonesia is one of the oldest universities in Indonesia, and also one of the most respectable among state universities. If they do get high score in webometrics ranking, it should not be to nobody’s wonder.

Let’s go straight down the review: its design is quite simple. It adheres to much to the university official color: yellow. A yellow-dominated website can be great. However, since UI has no other color (except the black text and the very pallidly colorful picture), it just bores almost anyone visiting it for the first time. So, for the design, it just needs lots of improvement.

As for the service, this site is quite complete. You can find it’s profile and all introductory stuffs, you can find its button to IT-based services for students, you can find catchy links to the university’s units, such as research center and language center, which are often very important for people.

By the way, don’t forget about the fact that research center’s site is quite separated from the official university site with completely different tone of design. It’s quite refreshing.

Last but not least, what makes it not-so-nice-visiting is its English version. There is only several pages available in English, they’re the introductory pages. Many hyperlinks on the English version pages lead to Indonesian pages. And the English news page also needs more frequent updating. Anyway, congratulations for UI for being the best Indonesian university site in webometrics ranking.