Columbia.edu

Columbia.edu is Columbia's domain name and home page. It was notoriously behind the times until a few years ago. Nevertheless, it's still fairly crap.

The domain name was registered on July 5th, 1985, and the first servers for the domain were hooked up in September 1985. The registration is next scheduled to expire on July 31st, 2007.

You can submit photos for the slideshow to the webmasters, who may crop them and put them up.

2003 Design

In December 2003, Columbia launched a new version of its homepage. After soliciting feedback from various sources, the website designers produced a design that was largely unexpected by students who'd had input earlier in the process. University Senator Jennifer Schnidman CC '06 is quoted at the time as saying "We gave the designers a lot of feedback and ultimately the direction they chose to go in was something completely different than what we suggested," noting that student council members had approved a much more traditional design in terms of color, layout, graphics, and fonts. Frank Wolf, chair of the web advisory committee responded that "You can't design by committee. There are always going to be some people who want something tweaked."

One particular criticism voiced by observers was that they had been shown designs with a blue backgrounds, and the website broke a cardinal rule of web design by using a stark white background instead. Designers at DKV noted that a strong consideration in choosing the background color of the page was how it would look when projected onto a screen at presentations to alumni. You know, as opposed to how aesthetically pleasing it would be to web surfers.

History

• Columbia.edu design 2000-2003
• Columbia.edu design December 1996-2000