I was digging through some old files last night and came across the slide deck of a workshop I taught in 1998 on creating quality web sites. The third slide in the deck included the headline from an article that stated “Most Web Sites Are Bad, Really Bad”. It was an accurate description for most college web sites in the late 1990’s.
So how much have college web sites improved over the past 13 years?
In the course of my consulting work I have benchmarked several hundred college web sites over the past few years including main sites, sites for administrative units, and sites for academic departments (which is always my favorite). In addition, I have conducted dozens of site audits. These audits are an expert evaluation of a site, examine the site based on graphic design, navigation, usability, quality of coding, accessibility, and more.
Well here we are in 2011 and IMHO, most college web sites are still pretty bad.
I’ll be the first to admit that I am a tough grader. I have high expectations. I expect:
- Basic usability principles to be followed
- A professional design
- Intuitive navigation
- Well written content
- The code to validate (to current standards)
- The CSS to validate
- To never see tables used for layout (yes, I still see this on many sites)
- The site to be fully accessible (pet peeve – when a college’s page on accessibility is itself inaccessible)
- To never find broken links
- To never find outdated content
- Pages that load fast
- And I expect that this will be the case for all pages, not just top level pages.
My guess is that many of you feel the same way. The No Laughing Matter article on Inside Higher Ed last summer that discussed the infamous xkcd venn diagram was one of the most discussed articles on that site in the past year.
While the main cause of these problems back in 1998 was the skill and experience of the campus web team, in most cases that is no longer the case. The reasons that college web sites haven’t improved lie much deeper and include campus politics, campus culture (academic freedom anyone?), HIPPOS (HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion), lack of resources, and most importantly, a lack of formal governance and management.
So back to the title of this post. True or false: most college are bad? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
I think the quality has increased among the top performers in higher education as we can see every year with eduStyle Awards.
However, this is a different story for the rest of the pack.
While I definitely agree with you on the need for better web governance, I’m wondering if the evolution of the Web (and the social media craze we’ve been experiencing in higher ed) hasn’t lower the bar in terms of technical skills required from Web teams.
Lately (at least that’s what I saw on the higheredexperts job board), it seems as if “hiring money” for the Web has gone towards social media – and namely improving the quality of university facebook pages, twitter profiles and the likes and NOT the website.
I’m not saying it’s right, but it looks like it’s where the pack is going.
That is indeed a tough list to accomplish well! Nonetheless, I seen many university sites make positive strides forward, but yes, there’s still much improvement that can be made.
The single most important concept I still think would have the biggest impact is to change the fundamental organizing principle away from the org chart (content being structured around department sites) and toward degree programs. Ask any undergrad (the applicability for grad students is slightly different) what information they need to know in order to choose a college and they’ll say:
1. Do you have a program of study that interests me?
2. Can I afford that program?
3. Is the culture of the school something that fits my personality (will I fit in?)
4. Grad level students will additionally want to know about faculty and research and less about cultural fit on a social level
Given these parameters, departments should take a secondary role and the program a primary role. Organize content so that the topic of study is the central building block. I see too many university sites where you find your program of study through the top level pages only to be dumped into a departmental site where you have to do the same thing again. Fix this and everything else begins to fall into place: building community around a logical bond and presenting appropriate content (research, faculty, pricing, culture, etc.) while, importantly, filtering out a lot of stuff that’s not relevant because it has nothing to do with that person’s preferred degree program.
@Mike
“…departments should take a secondary role and the program a primary role.”
Too true! Your observation scratches a pain point within higher ed–it’s time to set aside our departmental politics and focus on the student.
I have to agree with you, Mark. I’ve had similar experiences working on sites for a variety of institutions at all different levels and still see many of the same problems. Yes, site designs appear fresher and more sophisticated and many have refined the user experience at the very top levels, but most still have critical flaws and fall apart as you dig down to departments and offices.
I just completed a competitive analysis on the websites of six prominent institutions, several of which have spiffy looking new designs. Despite their nice appearance on the surface, if you evaluate the site’s navigation and content based on content and tasks important to various audiences (go to any site and check out financial aid, billing, the catalog or any academic department) many sites fail big-time.
Your high expectations for a site aren’t any different that the expectations of real users of the site (they just don’t express them in the same way). They expect to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for and when they do, they expect the content to be good. When I’ve interviewed and observed users, they are pretty forgiving of a less sophisticated graphic design if the site helps them do or learn what they came there for. On the flip side, the “wow” of a beautiful design fades quickly if the overall experience is frustrating.
Another issue that is all to common is that there is still a lack of expertise in the people building websites. Once you get past a central team and maybe a few people at the faculty/school/department level, colleges still rely on folks with little to no experience or knowledge in web technology and/or communications.
The CMS has always been thought of as the saving technology that will lead us to better websites. What it’s really done is allowed colleges to assign the responsibility of building websites to people that are not qualified to do so.
Is is right for someone be deciding the IA of your site just because they can add a page to the site?
Should an admin assistant in a department have the responsibility of updating your online marketing content because budgets are tight and he/she can copy and paste from word?
This mentality that anyone who is able to work a piece of software can build websites is contributing to every singe factor listed above.
Bad content, bad code and bad design.
The fact that there are not enough senior folks asking for accountability from websites allows the problem to continue.
As long as the current mentality for many college websites is to “just get the content up on the website” we will continue to see bad websites.
I agree, the vast majority of higher ed sites are poor examples of the best-practices in web development and user experience. We have no shortage of people pointing fingers at WHY the system doesn’t encourage better web experiences for our students, but I can’t find the leaders that say “We fixed it at XYZ U, here’s how.” Either nobody has fixed it and we’re all doomed until someone finds a way, the people who have fixed it aren’t speaking up, or people need to seek out those who have fixed it and find out what they did to break the barriers the rest of us are facing and put it out there to start a movement. The latter is where I’m focusing my energies these days.
I would agree that most college websites are bad.
In working with several institutions, we’ve encountered roadblocks for every point on your list, Mark. I’ve wondered to myself, and even proposed to a couple clients (only half joking) that two distinct sites be created and maintained – one public-facing, streamlined, professionally created and maintained, and one intranet that they can do with what they please and no one but the faculty and staff that work there have to deal with and maintain.
I agree with the factors you outlined. The other prominent one would be skills and expertise of those in a leadership position. At far too many institutions the person “in charge” of the web presence is the person with the best talent at HTML and keeping up with reading about industry trends. A true leader in this realm understands the needs of all audiences (depending on the unit) and efficiently manages their resources.
You’ve hit on some of the key problem areas. I came from the corporate world to a job in higher education managing the online content – and it really was a culture shock. When I arrived, even the idea that you could get all the pages on the site to use a similar color scheme was daunting.
The problem that I’ve consistently run in to again and again is that:
– Every stake holder in every department thinks that their content or message is most important at the expense of all others.
– Everyone wants the latest, greatest, slickest UI elements, but there’s no willingness to invest in the resources it would take to do it well for the top level all the way down.
– Even when you can push a slick UI for those key groups who have the right pull to get it done, there’s a dearth of content to fill out the pretty containers. What is there isn’t fresh, and the little that is fresh likely won’t get updated.
– Everyone who’s ever had a Geocities site or used Frontpage fancies themselves a webmaster while invoking academic freedom with insistance that they get to try their new project out on your server.
– Later, rinse, repeat
For any product to reach quality, there has to be an owner who takes responsibility for that product and can guide it to the quality desired. While my job description says I’m that product owner – my ability to enforce standards, restrict access to server resources, or make final decisions on what does/does not go online says that I’m not. This is the core problem. If I’m not, who is? It can’t be a committee of 300 – yet sadly that’s often the case.
Not true, there are many colleges which take their Internet presence very seriously. Although state colleges and many smaller institutions are not able because of budget fallout, it’s often the case many of the upper class institutions will offer their students to run the main website.
I’ll add one more issue to the pile here: many if those whom we serve lack a real understanding of the skills and knowledge needed to put together an effective website. Many, even senior managers, still see the web as primarily an IT issue. The creation of web content gets pushed down to junior faculty and from there to administrative assistants and from there to students. All are well-meaning but lack the skills, experience, and perspective to actually create effective websites and web content.
That is, the creation of websites isn’t seen as a professional endeavor. “So you’re a webmaster? That’s nice. My teenage son has a website.”
It’s frustrating. Would it be ok if, instead of having a central health center for our students, we allowed each department to train a couple of grad students to provide health care?
The flip side is that web teams need to prove themselves worthy of professional-level trust. To some extent, we need to educate our clients about what we do, why we do it, and how it benefits the institution. We also need to be able to demonstrate our value
hi all, First time poster and excited to be a part of the conversation !
Thanks everyone for your great comments.
I will be exploring this issue in more detail this Thursday, February 24 for the eRecruitment Web Forum where I will be presenting a webinar called
Do you folks have any specific examples of schools that are “doing it right”?
We’re in the beginning of a complete overhaul of our web presence at my college and I desperately would like to see examples of sites in your opinion are getting it right. We’re modeling elements of our new structure off of some of the following schools
http://www.uconn.edu
http://www.harvard.edu
http://www.dartmouth.edu
http://www.stanford.edu
http://www.virginia.edu
Thank you,
-Dan