Conclusions

In addition to accademic information (or stuff like that), a great university site should provide original content (student union information, city guide, detailed scholarship information, ...): only in this case, the user probably will revisited the site. In particular, students are letting themselves in for more than information about accademic departements when they see a university site.

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Be interactive; users, that interact with the site, create content for the site's designers. Suggestions, comments about the workability of the site are always useful. A good example of interactive site is IC site, that allows users to make comments about the usability of the webspace.
Moreover, forms, used to request material about the university, are always welcome.

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The homepage is the most important page of your site because it gives the first impression. If the homepage looks professional, artistic and if it appears to have interesting contents, there is a good chance that surfers will stay.
The homepage index tells user where to find the important information. The basic set of links found on almost every page included: admission, accademics, administration, campus life, alumni and libraries link. This table of content, in my humble opinion, seems to cover the major topics. And, in addition, it is complete: no more items should be included in the hompage because it's my impression that trying to make links to everything (from the homepage) is not a clever idea.

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All the evaluated sites follow this simple rule, but I would like to underline this important point: it is just absurd that the user have to wait 15 seconds to load an image, while she/he has to pay by minute for connection time.

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I think that most of the users aren't interested in scrolling for information: the content could be strickly scientific, but with kilometric text surfers should have the possibility to print the material, otherwise they will hit the "Back button" faster than a politician changes his position on a issue.
In general, a good rule is to limit each page to no more than 2 or 3 screens because, as I wrote earlier on, people don't like to scroll forever and ever. Moreover, it is useful to avoid critical descriptive text.
Most of the evaluated university sites seem to have screens through which the user has to scroll when the surfing comes to lower level pages.
Warning! It's true that the people are reluctant to scroll, but breaking up a single report over multiple pages (as I saw for a report on c++ language in IC site) is not convenient: users have to pay for the connection, so waiting 5 seconds for each page is not a plus.

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Avoid poorly described links; only the most devoted user will worry to explore any of them.

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A poorly designed website discourages user immediately. When user find an abundance of "under construction" errors, he/she can decide not to return. The site loses credibility. An important international university should avoid to provide poorly designed website: it is certainly not a trait of a credible school.

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