UCS has the best university website, but many still not up to par

Oct. 18, 2012 - PRLog -- Four out of ten would-be university students choose their chosen seat of learning by looking at university websites – but new research from Sitemorse shows many of our colleges and universities may be shooting themselves in the foot in the search for the best applicants.

The reason?  University and college sites with errors and problems may well discourage students from applying, in favour of those that work well. The Sitemorse Q4 Universities website benchmark has found a majority of higher learning establishments don’t come up to the mark in terms of having efficient sites , which may be leading applicants to look elsewhere.

And university sites that are not accessible to disabled people may potentially exclude them from taking part in social, educational, and professional activities on campus.

The results of our benchmark once again show a huge variation on performance in key criteria across nearly 300 further educational establishments all around the UK. Testing is undertaken by Sitemorse using our specialised automated software that reads the first 125 pages of each site to generate a ranked table.

Congratulations to University Campus Suffolk (UCS) which has risen an impressive 58 places since our last survey in July to take first place this time. 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 8.7 out of a possible ten marks, a clear point ahead of any of the other 290 universities and colleges tested.

Second in our league table is the Bishop Grossetest University College with a score of 7.6. This Lincoln-based university, established in 1862 topped our benchmark last time and its scoring has dropped slightly since then.
Also dropping one to third place is Leicester’s De Montfort University, which claims its teaching boosts the UK economy by £389 million each year and creates more than 12,000 jobs. Our benchmarking scored them at 7.5 out of a possible ten marks, a very slight drop on our previous survey.

Fourth, fifth and sixth in the survey this time were South Cheshire, Newcastle and Walsall , with scores between 6.9 and 7.4 out of 10. The rest of the top ten performers are the Bridgewater, West Cheshire, and East Riding Colleges, with Barnstaple-based Petroc down one since the last survey at tenth position.

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.

Improvements in their websites have led to some steep risers in our survey, so congratulations are also in order to  Gower College Swansea, up 131 places, Blackburn College, a riser of 134, Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College, rising 145 places, the Scottish Agricultural College, up 151, and Stourbridge College, up 170.

We always expect some volatility in each of our surveys because of the large number of changes happening across hundreds of websites in a sector, and this one is no exception. The largest faller this time is New College, Nottingham, down 200 places from the last survey, but others dropping down the table include North Glasgow, Neath Port Talbot and Mid-Cheshire Colleges, and Writtle College, which dropped 158 places overall.

The lowest-rated higher education websites in our table are those of Kensington College of Business and City College, Coventry, which both scored around two out of ten marks overall.  

Most university websites still score poorly on accessibility

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 sight loss, 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 scorer on accessibility, rated nine out of ten, was Warwickshire College. The college was rated 20th overall in the table. Good scores of eight out of ten were also recorded by De Montford and University Campus Suffolk (UCS)

A total of 49 university and FE College websites scored zero on accessibility, however, with a large number of ones and twos out of ten. This is a very slight improvement on our last survey, where 52 scored zero, but still far from an impressive result in this area.

Our conclusion:

Well done to UCS, Bishop Grossetest and De Montfort for their performances, with scores that match any of the top websites in other key sectors that we survey. Overall, university website performances are not brilliant, it has to be said, with only 233 out of a total of 291 tested managing to score five or more out of ten marks. The accessibility results are particularly disappointing as they could hint at a risk of litigation in the future should a website viewer not be able to navigate a site properly.

Given that many of the errors and problems that bring the scores down can be easily fixed, we’d like to see a bit more effort from many of the UK colleges and universities to try and improve their failing grades.





About our surveys, and how they work

For more than a decade, Sitemorse has been the world's only single solution for web content governance, monitoring, recording and benchmarking.

Our unique Index publications, published several times a year, provide an up to the minute snapshot of the best and brightest business websites, with insight into which are passing – and failing - vital tests in performance, compliance, and accessibility.

Our software is used to test the sites of major organisations in a variety of sectors, (for example, FTSE All Share companies, and the UK Top 500 retail companies) to compile an index of who ‘does the web’ best.

Sitemorse is now the suite of choice for organisations wishing to ensure their sites provide total, holistic web governance and a great user experience. Our hundreds of clients across major corporates, local and national government, utilities, financials and the health sector rely on us to help them improve the performance, compliance and quality of their websites, delivering control and web confidence.  

Web content management systems alone cannot hope to cover major issues such as performance, compliance, brand, accessibility and quality without help. Our products integrate (including pre-live checking - within your CMS) to ensure these vital areas are constantly under control.

We offer three levels of products, from our enterprise platform 'Governisation', a blend of governance and optimisation, to a suite of tools to help web editors and managers, as well as free in-browser tools that can be used by any web user to quickly ensure pages are error-free. All our services are SaaS based, with no set-up or management and are designed to ensure that our hundreds of clients in major corporations, the financial sector, and central and local government have total confidence in their websites.

Technical Data

This survey took place on October 2, 2012 and involved benchmarking well over half a million separate URLs. Poorest code quality was recorded for the Wakefield College site, with more than 38,000 failures. Fastest overall response time from any site tested, as in previous surveys of this sector, was the University of West London.

More information

•   More information about our surveys and what they test can be seen on our website at www.sitemorse.com
•   For further Information: Geoff Paddock, Head of Communications on +44 1525 375057, gpaddock@Sitemorse.com