Making CollegeRecruiter.com Less Like the Wisconsin Dells

The Wisconsin Dells is an area which has incredible natural beauty, is very close to Madison and a few hours northeast of Chicago, features many hotels with incredible waterparks, and may have the highest concentration of billboards of any town in the U.S. Get outside of the town and you are in heaven.
If you go to the Dells and drive through the town, you feel that you are almost literally in an obnoxious carnival. It is really unfortunate that the town leaders didn’t have the foresight decades ago to limit or even prohibit the massive store signs and billboards which visually pollute their town and give you the urge to move your wallet from your back pocket to your front pocket or perhaps even a money belt.

So what does this have to do with CollegeRecruiter.com? As is the case with too many web sites, we have the tendency to add “just one more thing” to our pages. Each individual link and banner is fine, but once you’ve added a bunch of them the effect is to visually pollute our site design. We have, in short, transformed a very clean, Google-esq look-and-feel into something which closely resembles the Wisconsin Dells.
Within days, look for a much cleaner design with much easier navigation. We’ve listened to the job seekers, employers, consumer marketers, and other stakeholders who use our site and find it hard to find the articles and other information they want. I’ve seen the final mock-ups and they’re a HUGE improvement over what we have now. We’ll still have the Google-esq look-and-feel that we want, but without the clutter.