I appreciate that you are seeking feedback - it really was and is a frustrating experience to try to find information on the website.
I'll pull up two other schools I applied to for comparison so you can see what I mean:
Cornell and
Ohio. These aren't perfect sites, but they are so much better than NCSU's site.
As an interested student with no experience with the school's site, if I go to Cornell's site I can find admissions information right away: it's clearly labeled "College Admissions" in the top menu bar. What does NC State put in its top menu bar on its absolute front page, which ostensibly contains the most important and frequently-used links in the entire website? Programmatic areas of study (!). I get that NCSU is proud of their unique areas of study, but that is hardly the very first piece of vital information that anyone is looking for on the site, student or not. (And if you do click on one of the programmatic areas of study, there is no admissions link anywhere - even though it would be logical to include admissions links on these pages!)
On Ohio's site, I don't have to look long to find admissions information - "Future Students" is right there in bright red underneath the photos. A prospective student looking for admissions information has to click only once to be taken to a page packed with useful information. At Cornell, it's two clicks, but the links are clearly marked that will lead to admissions information. At NCSU, it is three clicks on three links, none of which are clearly marked or stand out from their surroundings in any way. First, you must click "Education," which is buried in the middle of an eye-straining white-on-red menu, then you must click "DVM Professional Degree Program" - again, buried in the middle of an unremarkable menu - and then you must look all the way to the other side of the screen to find the actual "Admissions" link. It's non-intuitive and it wastes time. I am not the only current student who hates working with the website.
Another difficulty when clicking through the menu options under Education and its subpages is that all of the pages look essentially the same. There are no photos, no visual indicator of where you are in the site, and no way to easily find your way to other pages. The result is that visitors feel lost and disoriented. For example, looking at the
education page, there is for some reason a link to the exact same page at the top of the menu on the left-hand side. Nearly all the pages on the site have these links to the exact same page you're on, which is not only redundant and unnecessary, but confusing. They should be eliminated entirely.
It would be so much better if NCSU's top menu on the Education page (About, Alumni, etc.) looked like tabs in a filing cabinet, which the menu
currently does, but only when you hover over the links. For a comparison, see Ohio's
admissions page. At the top menu, you can easily tell which subcategory of the site you are in. Looking at the menu on the right, you can easily see that you are in the Admissions subpage, and you can easily see your options to navigate within Admissions. Not only that, but the link to the page you are on is bolded and black. You are absolutely certain that you know where you are.
I could go on and on, but the biggest changes I would make are:
1. Get rid of the areas of study bar at the top of the first page and replace it with a no-nonsense top menu.
2. Make sure that at LEAST two links are at the top and in an eye-catching color on the very front page of the college: ADMISSIONS and ANIMAL EMERGENCY. Admissions, because prospective students will probably spend more time than anyone interacting with the site, and animal emergency, because prospective clients with an emergency on their hands won't have time to spend clicking around.
3. Make menus and submenus indicate where you are in the site. See the paragraph about Ohio's admissions page.
4. Add photos to pages. Doesn't matter what they are of - visitors will subconsciously register "oh, there's that cat again, this is the admissions page." Photos are just one more way to facilitate visual wayfinding on webpages.
5. Get rid of the links to the same page you're on that are found at the top of many menus.
This turned into a manifesto about website navigation and design, but I think it's important - this is the face that NCSU shows the world! I'm sorry to have gone on for so long, but visual representation of information is one of my weird obsessions. I am happy to talk with you if you want to discuss the site - I am on campus for the next couple of weeks. PM me if you are interested in meeting.
