Over the years, the University of Melbourne has established itself as one of the finest in Australia, if not the world. This website provides comprehensive information on everything you want to know about the Melbourne University.

First Impression
The gracious logo in the middle captured my attention when I first entered the site. The clever interplay between blue, white and multi-racial images communicates well to the end user of what the web site is trying to sell, the quality of their services. Actually, I am convinced that this school is the best simply by just visiting the home page. This is a good example of a well-designed academic site.

Design and Navigation
The navigation is well organized. Extreme care is taken not to clutter the pages with too much information. However, the switch from 3-column to 2-column layout and vice versa in some pages sometimes confuses the user. I thought the mouse-over effect could be made more effective by avoiding yellow background as the hover. Some of the inner pages uses underlined red effect which I think is better....But then again, it is just me and may not work for everyone.

At times, the left menu seems to drop down a little which seems odd but most of the time, the menu is well aligned. All the information is organized and separated by using green dotted borders, making it easy for the user to read. However, I was abit confused with the sub-menus within each categories. I thought they might be easier to read by adding simple bullets or graphics. The images used are also appropriate and touched up nicely which again shows the professionalism in designing the site.

The only part that I really do not like about the site is the footer...I think too much information is given there and most of them are useless to the end user.

Conclusion
Overall the website has been well structured, consistent and precisely presented. I hope more academic sites can follow the footsteps this one.

About Joe Edwards
Joe Edwards is a freelance web designer, currently staying in Adelaide. He is one of the core designers of sitecritic.net. As a crazy soccer fan, he spends most of his weekends watching the ESPN channel.This article is accurate at the time writing and is published in Sitecritic.net - Web Reviews, Design Ideas and Articles. You may reproduced this article only if this section remains intact.