One Big Frustrating Mess: The SFU website

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One Big Frustrating Mess: The SFU website

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     The Simon Fraser University website (www.sfu.ca) is, as the title suggests, a confusing mass of text, images, links, and information. It’s a place where new students spend endless hours attempting to become familiar with the site and its content. With an extremely poor search function and a horrible navigational system, it’s no wonder why many students find it difficult to find what they are looking for. On top of that, students must force themselves to stay awake as they browse through one of the most boring page layouts on the internet. Excluding images, each page on the entire website has only two colors and three shades of dull gray. The constant frustration combined with this boring page layout gives sfu.ca a depressing feeling. 

           One of the most troublesome problems that I have had throughout my experience with SFU’s website is acquiring information about each faculty such as course requirements, grade requirements, and costs. It is very difficult to navigate your way to such a page on the site. In addition, you will find that each faculty webpage is chalked full of pictures of smiling students who seem to be having a marvolous time at SFU. That's all fine but it becomes annoying when trying to find the real course information. Only after several attempts will one be able to find the small little button that takes you to your desired page.

      The website that teaches students about the university should not be so complicated. Students should feel welcomed as they first enter the site and should be able to navigate through it with ease. Instead of bombarding first-year students with new terms such as WQB, and providing vague explanations of them, the SFU website should introduce them slowly and explain them thouroughly in basic English. Visiting a website such as sfu.ca can be scary to newly admitted students and they can often feel lost; especially in a website as large as this one.

            But don’t let the website fool you, SFU is a great place to continue your education and to learn from amazing students and professors.