Boston University: www.bu.edu. It's clean, organized and easy to use.

~Deb

I like Cornell's site a lot. Really elegant, good information architecture, nice code.

The only thing I'm not crazy about is the main feature photo treatment.

http://oregonstate.edu/ -> I like the idea the layout (not color scheme) is trying to achive.

http://www.buffalo.edu/ -> Clean, allows for many useful links w/o overwhelming user

http://www.rit.edu/ -> This site has some good parts/ideas. Not great as a whole.

Matt Rapp has created a list of all US Universities in the community. Sure makes it easy to fine nice sites.

http://web.asu.edu/community/websites-other-u-s-universities

http://www.ucla.edu/ - UCLA has some interesting elements. The RSS and Podcast page really lays out what is available. Also the scrolling events list is interesting. However, the middle feature almost seems to waste space.

The one thing that I find challenging about our current promotion of features on asu.edu is tieing it back to the ideas of our mission as the New American University. You really have to know all of the design imperatives et al. to understand why that particular feature is being used. I would suggest some sort of categorization technique to provide context and help to drive home the importance of the New American University ideals. With that said, I like how the new proposed North Carolina State University home page highlights major stories that are tied to their key initiatives...You can see what I mean on their prototype page...

http://www.ncsu.edu/univ_relations/ncsunew/

I also like how they can have mulitple stories within each "section" or "theme" if you will.

I will also say that if we took this kind of approach, the wording you would use is important. Don't necessarily have to use the academic speak of some of the imperatives, etc. that we have.

gestalt/layout:

http://www.bu.edu/

http://www.usc.edu/

http://www.cornell.edu/

mission clearly defined:

http://www.goucher.edu/

http://www.trincoll.edu/

http://www.cmu.edu/

http://www.arizona.edu/

emotional/human connection:

http://www.smith.edu/ - I am Smith

http://www.bard.edu/

http://www.capella.edu/

web 2.0

http://www.colgate.edu/  - Colgate Live

http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/index.html  Why Rothman?

call to action:

http://www.ups.edu/ - how to participate 

other interesting solutions (not all relevant to the frontpage)

http://www.oxy.edu/  -  Oxy in action

http://www.vt.edu/   - pulling global outreach out front

http://www.brown.edu/  interesting nav

http://students.berkeley.edu/myberkeley/showcaltube.asp?autoplay=life  using google video

http://www.mitadmissions.org/   interesting nav at top (process oriented)

http://www.richmond.edu/prospective/faq/  great faq

http://www.alumni.cornell.edu/creative_ways.cfm   creative ways to give

http://www.bc.edu/friends/invest/BC-Fund-home.html  students you support  (emotional connect)

In addition to all the great links already posted (I love the Cornell web site), here are a few more links:

University of Nebraska - I like the way 5 different people are featured on the page

Portland State University - Simple and effective

• Cornell
• Simmons
• Hiram
• Reed
• Seattle U
• NYU

I stumbled across The University of Texas at Austin web site while researching web accessibility...and thought the front page is easy to use.

We made this as a repository for sites that are doing particular things right:

http://del.icio.us/asuf

It's mostly geared around foundations/giving, but there are some great general uni sites in there as well.

Stacy Holmstedt   ::   kipper@asu.edu