A Tale of the Scale of Misery

A couple of days ago, I went to this website (The College of Westchester)
because I work at a university and needed to look up some course descriptions
for an incoming student. This turned out to be one of the most frustrating
experiences I've ever had on a website. Oddly enough, there is no search field
anywhere on the site! Not even a site map! They have a drop down list of quick
links (which I think was on Nielsen's list of nasties, too), but that wasn't very helpful
at all, either. It took me to a few different landing pages in the site, but other than
that, I couldn't find any relevant information whatsoever. The whole experience was nerve-wracking and frustrating. Most schools post an HTML or PDF version of their course catalog, but not this one. I pretty much know the reasoning behind this - this institution is
more commercial, and wants potential students to fill out a "request information" form so they can contact the student over the phone and do their whole sales pitch (sounds sort of like our discussion last week about having to register on sites before they'll let you do anything).
Definitely not good at all for business. What college-aged student (or anyone else, for that
matter) has patience to weed through the entire site? I can't understand how they manage
to do business, unless it's mostly through newspaper ads, open houses, word of mouth, etc. They really need to think about fixing this problem, though, because the best way to reach
college age students these days is online.