Suffolk, Cheshire and Lincoln take top honours in Uni Websites

LONDON - April 19, 2013 - PRLog -- So it’s good news that our quarterly assessment of the websites of universities and higher education establishments once again shows improvement, with four universities in the top ten websites tested, and a general trend of university websites moving up our table covering nearly 300 university and college sites.

The second Sitemorse Index of higher education sites of 2013 spotlights quality and efficiency across the websites of the higher learning sector. The Index is undertaken by Sitemorse using our specialised automated software that reads the first 125 pages of each site to generate a ranked table, looking at key areas such as function, code quality, site performance and accessibility.

Full access to the survey  http://www.sitemorse.com/rt/947/d11c1582

This is important because web users have limited time and patience, and if a website does not work as expected they are more likely to go elsewhere than take the time to complain, leaving website managers potentially unaware of problems that might be driving users away.

Equally, websites that can’t be navigated by disabled users, apart from being illegal, may discriminate against students who cannot then take a full part in social, educational, and professional activities on campus.

Congratulations once again to University Campus Suffolk (UCS) which has held on to the top spot it managed in our previous two surveys in October 2012 and February this year.

UCS opened in 2007 and is a partnership between the University of East Anglia and the University of Essex, working with Great Yarmouth College, Lowestoft College, Otley College, Suffolk New College and West Suffolk College, with more than 4,000 current students. Our testing gave the UCS website a score of eight out of a possible ten marks, with a 7/10 score for accessibility.

Second in our league table this time is Crewe-based South Cheshire College with a score of 7.9/10, keeping the site in second position in our table. The site scored 6/10 for accessibility.

Third is Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln. Named after the great teacher, scholar, reformer, scientist and theologian Robert Grosseteste who was Bishop of Lincoln in 1235, the university has been offering higher education to students since 1862. The website scored 7.2 out of a possible ten marks, rising three places up the table since the last survey in February.

The Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (Coleg Brenhinol Cerdd a Drama Cymru) is in fourth position and rises four places from last time, narrowly ahead of West Thames College, a Hounslow-based college with more than 6,000 current students, in fifth. Also in our top ten places this time are the Hopwood Hall, Bishop Burton, Petroc, Bridgwater and London Electronics Colleges.

The remainder of our top 20 rated sites this time are The College of Agriculture, Food and Rural Enterprise, Farnborough College of Technology, Askham Bryan College, Gower College Swansea, Greenwich School of Management, The University of Edinburgh, East Riding College, Pembrokeshire College (Accredited College of University of Glamorgan), Anglo European College of Chiropractic (AECC), and the University of Wolverhampton.

Top climbers rising up the table this time include South Nottingham College (+168), Loughborough College (+161), Solihull College (+152), Guildford College of Further and Higher Education (+151) and Pembrokeshire College (+145).

Moving down our table this time are Keele University (-121), Queen Mary, University of London (-130), Wirral Metropolitan College (-131), York College (-148), and The University of Salford (-162).

Colleges in Norwich, Swindon, Coventry, Kensington and Newcastle were rated at the bottom of our table covering almost 300 sites.

Sitemorse surveys the websites of businesses and organisations in a number of sectors, and has been benchmarking and publishing the detailed results for a decade. The full results from this and other recent surveys can be seen on our website, www.sitemorse.com.

Accessibility is an important measure.
The 'digital inclusion' of disabled people is important for many of the sectors we survey, as well as being backed by the force of the law.  If someone with a disability such as poor vision can't access the information on a website then it could be seen as discrimination.

The Equality Act came into force in October 2010, replacing the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) in England, Scotland and Wales. Like the DDA, the Equality Act was introduced with the intention of comprehensively tackling the discrimination which many disabled people face.

Highest scorers on accessibility in our latest survey, all rated eight out of ten, were the University of Birmingham, University College, Birmingham, De Montfort University, Bridgewater College, Somerset, and the Arts University College at Bournemouth. Scores of seven out of ten were recorded for UCS Suffolk, the Royal Veterinarian College, Stratford-upon Avon, Exeter and Lincoln Colleges.

Our conclusion:

No less than 40% of  would-be university students pick their chosen seat of learning by looking at university websites – and with recent rises in UK tuition fees, competition from the creation of free massive open online courses, and recent statistics from UCAS revealing an 8.4% drop in UK student applications since November 2011, universities and FE colleges have to work harder than ever to meet the rising student expectations and ensure their institutions stand out from the rest. We have noted real improvements in the standard of higher education sites since we started our Index nearly two years ago.

About the Index

The quarterly Index Website Review, powered by the Sitemorse software platform, is an important independent benchmark that clearly shows how websites are performing, meeting compliance levels and satisfying their users.

It’s also a key indicator for website managers who, while always wanting to be at the top of their game, could be hampered by poor-performing suppliers, non-compliant legacy content or content management systems that often fail to spot errors affecting user experience.
Using Sitemorse’s services (http://www.sitemorse.com/) such as Governisation and the Web Manager’s Toolkit, which immediately find the issues that affect web users the most on any website, will help demonstrate real improvement and ensure control, and ultimately confidence, in your web presence. They can help spotlight content that may need updating, issues with staff training and support, and focus supplier management.

Technical Data
This survey took place on April 3rd 2013 and involved benchmarking well over half a million separate URLs.