Writtle College
I have looked at the branding of Writtle College. It is a Further Education (FE) college that provide Higher Education (HE) courses, just the same as New College Stamford (the college we are rebranding). I had a look at their website and found that as with all of the other FE college branding, the HE courses took a back step while the FE courses took more of a prominent role, which is understandable as they are FE colleges. On the other hand, an attraction of Uni is that everyone are all adults and they are roughly the same age, whereas, with an FE college, the age range can be from 16+.
The website had no direct entry to the HE section of the site. I think this was a trick missed. 
Once I actually found the HE section, there was an undergraduate and postgraduate section which I thought was ideal. However, at New College Stamford, there are only undergraduate courses available. I clicked on the undergraduate link, only to be underwhelmed.
There is very little information for the courses, admittedly, the navigation on the right, when clicked on, does take you to a selection of courses. I think that this is not a very good way of laying this out, as there are far too many pages with writing. This page could just be a list of their courses and have them all linked to the relevant course page. Instead, you have to go through another 2 pages to find the course you wanted.
There is a distinct difference between the 2 images above. They are the same students, same location and obviously the same series of images. However, there is one main difference. The student to the left of the image has a slight issue with his t-shirt. The writing has been photoshopped off the image that is going on the cover of the prospectus. This is understandable as they don’t want advertising. If this was the case, they had 2 options. Don’t use him in the other photo’s, or photoshop the writing out , in all of his images. Neither one was done. The next 3 images were all taken from the very prospectus that he is on the cover of (without writing). As you will see, there is writing on his top, in all of the other images.
Overall, the design of this website and prospectus is pretty dull. There is not modern elements to these designs, the old style line gradient as seen on the page numbers doesn’t help the design, plus the fact that you have to click on about 9 billion links before reaching the course information, just makes the website even worse to navigate. The dark green doesn’t do anything for anyone, the lighter green in the image above is slightly better but this is one of the very few times it is used. I understand it is a college based on the great outdoors and offers courses with horticulture and garden design, but it doesn’t all have to be green. The fact that they use the same 5-10 students throughout is a bit disappointing, but acceptable. Although it does seem that they only have that amount of students. Then the photoshopping… I don’t even know what to say.
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