Point. Click. Tufts.

When Brandy Chambers, a high school senior from New York, started her college search last year, the first thing she did was to go online. Using sites like princetonreview.com and collegeboard.com, she found colleges that fit her interests, then visited those schools for the first time on the Internet.

Chambers is just one of a growing number of high school students whose first introduction to prospective schools takes place online, via the schools' websites.

"It was pretty much your basic website," Chambers said of the Tufts website. "There were no real flaws. But for a school that prides itself on having anything but the "basic" undergraduate experience, a "basic" website may not be the impression Tufts wants to give prospective students.

As more and more activities migrate online, the public image that a university projects over the Internet has become increasingly important. Many schools are making web development a higher priority and recognizing its importance in courting applicants.

"This is no longer a nice additional asset. This is a medium that is being used frequently today," Dean of Admissions David Cuttino said.

The increasing use of websites to gather information about schools means that students can get all the information they need without ever having to talk to a person in an admissions office _ which means that such offices are having an increasingly hard time estimating the number of prospective applicants.

To cater to this trend, Tufts is about to undergo a massive redesign of a number of the main University websites, according to University officials. A new Arts, Sciences & Engineering website, unveiled last week, will eventually be followed with new versions of the main university homepage, the admissions website, the online directory, and the president's website, among others.

These changes, as well as the implementation of a Google search engine for the University's webpages, have been welcomed by students _ some of whom say that the current webpages are not easy to navigate.

"If I were a prospective student, and I looked at that page without looking for a specific piece of information... the site wouldn't jump out at me," Residential Computer Consultant Ed Schwehm said. The organization of the site is good for access, he said, but overall, is still "drab."

"It needs to be aesthetically pleasing," said Liz Tulminen, a high school senior from Easton, MA. "But it's more the information that's important."

Prospective students are looking for an "easy and quick" way to find out about colleges, and the Internet and college websites provide that ability, according to Frank Hartwell, a high school guidance counselor from Ardmore, PA. College websites "are the starting gate, the archway through which [students] pass."

The main Tufts website receives over 20,000 hits a day, though traffic varies according the time of year.

The Admissions Office is beginning its redesign with a new 'virtual tour' and is planning a comprehensive overhaul later on.

"Part of the challenge is thinking about the communications process, understanding that this is an important tool," Cuttino said. "It's not the only tool, but it is an important vehicle, through which peoples' understanding of and impression of the University is influenced."

A university's website is, in part, measured by the expectations that students have when they use any website, according to Casey Green, founder of The Campus Computing Project, the largest continuing study of the role of information technology in higher education.

In addition to using a university's website, "they have all these other experiences as consumers; they shop at J.Crew, buy books from Amazon, and look at their checking accounts on the Internet," Green said. "A challenge for many institutions is that a large part of the campus is two to three years behind the consumer experience, in terms of what's on the web."

This consumer experience includes frequent visits to sites that remember personal information about a user or save search and credit card information. Universities that have latched onto this trend of personalization have seen positive results.

When the University of Dayton personalized its admissions website so that students who were interested in certain aspects of the school would receive more information about that component, they saw that traffic on their admissions site increased by 738 percent. On top of that, applications to the school increased 50.7 percent, and those students who personalized the website actually enrolled at a higher rate than normal.

At other schools, slowness to adapt their websites to what prospective students are used to experiencing elsewhere on the web may be a direct result of budget challenges in their information technology departments. Many institutions "look at technology as a capital cost instead of an operating cost," Green said.

The hiring of new personnel is one sign that Tufts is taking the impact of the web seriously. Associate Director of WebCentral Anne Bala came to Tufts in August because she was attracted by the University's strong Internet vision.

"The University has very ambitious plans for the web and how it can be used to enhance and extend the learning experience," Bala said.

Current web projects include overhauling the University's search engines, developing university-wide online calendars, streaming media services, live web-casting, and implementing new hardware and software to expand the types of services the University offers.

"This kind of work is very important, as it will provide us with the necessary foundation to implement our long-term web initiatives," Bala said.

Web developers must find a balance to the amount of information they include on their sites. A site must also market the school to prospective students, remind nostalgic alumni of their days on campus, and cater to the utilitarian needs of current students and faculty.

According to Bala, the University has collected significant feedback on how to better make use of the web and is now committed to boosting Tufts' Internet presence. "Tufts has a good foundation and now we just need to build upon that as we go forward," she said.