After looking at the Rutgers Admissions Blog, it is an interesting blog that shows prospective students who are interested in applying to Rutgers what the school and campus have to truly offer. The blog is mostly from a student’s point of view; therefore there is no bias towards one side. Students can talk about the positives and the negatives of the school. Many of the posts include really great advice and tips from a diverse group of students. Students can be diverse in age, majors, ethnicity, etc. One student’s experience at Rutgers can be the complete opposite of another student’s college experience because of their differences. The blog allows prospective students to view both sides and help them make the ultimate decision.
The Rutgers Admission blog has a nice title banner. The background color appropriate since the school color is scarlet red. The tag cloud has its pros and cons. A pro is that you can see what the hot topics are. For example, Rutgers has a very strong pharmacy program; therefore pharmacy is larger than some of the other words in the tag cloud. The bigger the word is, the more the word is used in the blog. However, the group agrees that the tag cloud is distracting because it makes half the page seem like it’s cluttered with random words.
The titles of the posts are creative, but do not give a good description of what the post will be about. In addition, many of the post do not have tags. When a post doesn’t have any tags it is hard to locate key words. The tags help the readers get a sense of what topics the post will cover.
Another negative about the site is that is has a long loading time. The site easily crashes as seen during class. It seems like if 20 users visits the site at once, the site will shut down. When the site crashes, it will be less likely for a reader to revisit the page due to inconvenience. In addition, some browsers were unable to view the comments to the posts.
We also notice that the tag cloud goes all the way down the page, and the post list ends half way down the page. It would be better if the post list goes down the entire page and the tag cloud should be shorter.
Lastly, we suggest that the blog has more pictures on the home page. This will make the blog more attention grabbing and attractive. Usually in magazines or newspaper, there is a large picture on the front page to capture the reader’s attention.