Decision Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Decision - Essay Example These places on the web are full of information for students, faculty and potential students. In addition to housing information about current events or application procedures, the university web site attempts to present a certain image about the school. In marketing, this would be called branding. Universities try very hard to convince potential students that they can expect specific opportunities and live a certain lifestyle if they attend this university. In this way, college web sites have become increasingly influential in attracting prospective students to individual schools. A great way to see how this is done and whether it is done well is to compare the web sites of two different universities. In this activity, Penn State University and Stanford University are compared and contrasted. The Penn State University web site is adorned in blue and white, the school colors. The first impression I have when looking at their web site is that it is not very visually appealing. The blu e background seems to overpower the rest of the page. The images are poorly done as well. Visually, the photographs used are simply photos of people not doing particularly interesting things. There is the image of two individuals standing in a laboratory, an image of a white kid standing neck to a man dressed in some sort of traditional dress and other photos of graduate and undergraduate students. The images are given very little context, other than a heading above each that seems to shout â€Å"Research† and â€Å"Global†. They are also tagged with captions that seem a bit insipid, such as, â€Å"How can research improve our lives and communities?† Anyone contemplating college should already have some answers to this question, so the reader is not inclined to click on the link to find out more. What is nice about the Penn State University web site is the clean design and the ease of finding the most useful information. Key links are found in a neat column that flanks the right side of the photomontage. These include links to lists of campuses, a visitors guide and new student information. Below the photo montage there is a horizontal band of links to information for professionals concerning jobs and the faculty portal. Immediately below this, a search window is prominently displayed. Overall, the layout sends the message for the university that this wed site is a tool that you can use to access information. The utility of the web site seems to be of utmost importance to the designers, because it is not a very visually attractive or stimulating website in any way. One of the amazing things about the web and school web sites it their ability to change and evolve. I insert this paragraph here, because the Penn State site has actually changed since I have begun researching these two universities. The Penn State site is now much more visually appealing, having combined all of the photographs into a scrolling sequence window. Some of the photo s are the same, so they are still not particularly intriguing or interesting, but they work better on the screen one at a time. This gives the photo a better context. The sequencer also breaks up the monotony of just having half a dozen photos of people staring into the camera lens. This new design is a great improvement over the original page I saw on the Penn State site yesterday. The Stanford web site is more visually appealing than the Penn State site, even with the improvements. A beautiful photo of historical actors is accompanied by a headline stating, â€Å"Picture Jasper Ridge: Biological Preserve Provides Unique Space for Performance Piece.† This photo and headline makes me want to learn more. I find myself asking questions about Jasper Ridge and the nature of the performance that is going to take

Urban tourism Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words - 1

Urban tourism - Essay Example In fact after WWII, Haiti was among the leading countries that had taken advantage of the international tourism that had aroused from the global economic restoration. This had created in Haiti an estimate of more than 60,000 direct and indirect jobs, contributed a 3.5% share to the country’s GDP, and earned an annual income of $50 million. (International Monetary Fund 34) According to Americas, during 1950s and ‘60s Haiti had been one of the strongest competitors in the tourism industry in the Caribbean (qtd. in Pawlowski 1). However, the development of tourism in Haiti has been historically lopsided and marred with many setbacks. Even during the most auspicious times, Haiti’s tourism has never attracted a significant portion of the total Antilles tourist market. Only Labadie on the northern coast has achieved consistent success, being the docking site of tourist cruises in the Caribbean (Lundahl 64). It was in Labadie where the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line has been landing in Haiti for nearly 30 years, without informing tourists that it is actually part of Haiti, instead referring to it as an ‘island’ on Hispaniola (Lazar, par. 12-3; Pawlowski 2). Furthermore, the worsened political and social instability since the ending of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s dictatorial regime in 1986 (Hudman and Jackson 134) plus the inadequate infrastructure needed by a flourishing tourist industry – the focus of Duvalier’s later investments, have greatly pulled Haiti’s tourism indu stry backward, leaving a mere 800 hotel rooms available for tourists by the latter part of 1990s (Street 5). After Duvalier’s fall, though Haiti’s political leadership remains unstable, the second ascension to Presidency of Renà © Prà ©val in 2004 has brought a slow yet better changes to Haiti, such as, a stabilizing Haiti’s political climate; a