UCD's site (www.ucd.ie) homepage has a picture of a smiling, gowned graduate and a hurler, as well as pictures of lecture theatres and the grounds. It is a nice way of presenting the varied life of a college campus that lets you know that there is more to the place than pure academia.
However, potential academia is the reason that many people will be visiting the site and the link to the Prospective Students section is prominently flagged from the home page. This includes all that Irish school-leavers and international applicants need to know about applying for the college. A very useful development is the inclusion of the entire undergraduate prospectus in PDF format. If downloading this is a problem for your computer, you can email the admissions office for a paper copy.
The magazine UCD News is also within the site. Here you can read stories such as "Optoelectronics world record achieved at UCD". Such articles are just the kind of thing that may make a prospective student pick one college over another.
Also very good is the About UCD section, which has good information on such things as the college history and its conference facilities. It also has transport details and a campus map.
Trinity College's site (www.tcd.ie) has a fairly sparse home page dominated by a single picture of the main square at dusk. It's a lovely picture, but it would be worthless if the content wasn't up to scratch, which it is.
One of the links from the homepage is to the Centre for Educational Access and Community Development - Trinity's programme to tackle educational disadvantage and increase the participation rate of groups that are currently under-represented in the third level sector.
The course directory, the reason many people visit college sites at this time of year, is divided by department and is easy to read and understand. There is also a section on currently available positions in the college, making the site useful for graduates as well. The accommodation section deals not only with students, but also with staff and summer visitors. Overall, a very well designed site.
UCC's site (www.ucc.ie) has a very busy home page. It has all the usual sections that you expect a college site to have, but also one that I've never seen anywhere before: a whole section of full texts of conferring addresses from 2000. They were not all given by lecturers either - people such as poet and broadcaster Theo Dorgan have spoken at UCC conferrings. It must be wonderful for graduates, maybe at the other side of the world, to just get on the web and read the speech given at their graduation. An excellent idea, and one that other college sites should not be shy about copying.
The Research in UCC section is comprehensive and contains a few surprises for the casual browser. I did not know, for instance, that there is an Irish Centre for Mexican Studies based in UCC.
The Clubs and Societies part of the Student Life section is impressive, containing information on everything from the Accounting and Finance Society to the Wargaming and Role-playing Society, along with dozens of others in between. There is also a useful guide to the college's student services.
The one area it falls down on is the section for the University Examiner, which is, it says, Ireland's only weekly student newspaper. It may well be, but the last time they had an online edition of it was April, 1999. It is also difficult to find your way into the stories that are indexed.
Other university websites will be covered later.
