Who Has a Better School Website?

This week I compared the school websites of the Barbra Bush Middle School and the Westlake High School for their aesthetic conventions and navigational construction.

Let us begin with the Barbra Bush Middle School. The school's theme color seems to be maroon and beige, which are displayed as the background colors and text color respectively. This is a combination that works, though not the best I have seen. With the exception of the "Bush calendar" and the "Supply List," this theme is consistent in the entire website. The theme discontinues to those web pages because they are authored by another source. Link colors are absent all together. Which web pages you have visited before is unknown as a result.



Its navigation tabs are arranged in the tried-and-true column on the left hand side of the site, though a link to the site map is missing. I especially like how the navigation style changes on the "Electives and Student Clubs" page to be a chess board with the lines on the board. Some of the frames are obtrusive to the information on the pages, such as the "Athletics" page. Pictures are few and far between, but there is an interesting video of "Today's Morning Announcements" on the home page. This website is easy to load up, but it does not fit in screen of my browser.

The strength of this website is its simplicity, but that is also its shortcoming. It is not entertaining or interesting in any way at all. Unless you are a student with a destination web page, it is not a friendly web site to casually browse for fun.

Next I evaluated the Westlake High School’s website. Its school theme for the background is navy-blue. Its primary text color is white. This is a winning combination for web pages and is much better than the example above. Unfortunately blue background theme is replaced by a white text theme and the text color defaults to black in most sub-pages. This inconsistency is both detrimental yet reminding that the user is on a sub-page of the home page. Think of building a pyramid and painting the different colors in a descending order of the color spectrum. When these theme changes occur, the standard blue to purple link color changes are present on the page. Frames and boarders of these web pages are not obtrusive to the information displayed.



Its navigation tabs are arranged in a less conventional horizontal row at the top of the page. I actually like this layout more because it forces the designers to avoid posting more than 4 categories in this navigation bar. All of the subjects and basic features of a school, like libraries and athletics, are clearly visible from the home page. This is not so for the Bush Middle school. Another difference in navigation is that the “Westlake High School” header at the top-left corner off all its web pages is a link back to the home page. This is not the case for the Bush Middle School, whose header is centered at the top of pages and is not a link. Pictures are consistent but not overly abundant. The website is easy to load up and does fit into my web browser window without needing to zoom out.

Overall this is a superior website than that of the Barbra Bush Middle School.

Comparing these two to my high school website at is more despairing. The American School of Bombay’s website is less accessible than these ones. Its beige background, boarders, and text colors are acceptable. It also boasts a similar tab layout to its navigation bar with the Westlake design. But Bombay’s website is simplistic and less offering because we students were the only ones trained to navigate it and find the important bits. That home page is for parents to look at a pretty slideshow and pay the bills; little more. Like the Barbra Bush Middle School, its simplicity is its greatest asset and weakest link with the parents. I still prefer its aesthetic layout over the Barbra Bush Middle School’s website, which is hands-down the most lacking of all the websites discussed in this post.