Carroll Community College's Website

The Carroll Community College's website is not the best that I have ever seen. I have heard a lot of people agree that the design and look of the website is not very impressive. The color scheme and overall design leaves much to be desired, and so as I talked about in my last post, I have the chance to redesign the website.
As a student at this school, I have seen this website so many times that honestly, I never thought too much about it from a design point of view, mostly I just used it for school, but now i am going to start looking at it from a designers point of view, rather than from a functionality point. One thing that right from the start I notice, is that the most important links for students is the links on the left, the Web advisor, Blackboard and etc, are pretty small compared to some of the other parts. Why they have the Make a Gift, Facebook, Twitter and other links so much bigger I do not understand. Just from a design point though, the header is extremely boring, there is nothing but the logo at the top left, and then just purple, and the nav has no decoration or anything but text. More so, the look of a layer of purple (from the header), black (navigation), dark gray (top of content) and light gray just does not work well together. It just doesn't look right having the layer of dark gray up top, it just looks really dumb there. I can sort of see what they were trying to go for, but it just doesn't work. It makes the right and left side look unbalanced and cuts the page into weird sections, which shouldn't be the point of the content.
The bottom section of the content doesn't look right either. They used a big picture in the center for the top section, but then used images on the right and left side of the bottom part, and I just think it draws way too much attention to the wrong parts of the page. As I've said in previous posts, the parts of the page that are suppose to draw the most attention are the header and logo, because these are suppose to give you an idea of what the site is about.

To improve this site, I would make the color scheme different, and try to bring more color and creativity to this site. The purpose of a school is to help students be everything they want to be, and to help bring out their creativity and personality in their work. The complicated part of a college website is that it needs to be directed at multiple types of people, the college students already attending, perspective students, and parents of those students.
This is the entire content part of the page, and honestly it is just confusing and not very well designed. The top background coloring is just a waste and the most prominent parts are not the most important part of the site. I would honestly completely change this website, not only the coloring and layout, but the content, order of important things and how the site is organized. I will probably just take the content information, such as some of the things that are going on at the school right now. I hope to redesign this website to look more professional and colorful and to draw more attention to the most important information on the page.