University websites start to move up our league table

Jan. 15, 2013 - PRLog -- Six quarters later, there are four universities in the top ten websites tested, and a general trend sees university websites moving up our table covering nearly 300 university and college sites.

Four out of ten would-be university students choose their chosen seat of learning by looking at university websites – and with recent rise in UK tuition fees, competition from the creation of free massive open online courses (MOOCs), and recent statistics from UCAS revealing an 8.4% drop in UK student applications since November 2011, universities have to work harder than ever to meet the rising student expectations and ensure their institutions stand out from the rest.

So the first Sitemorse benchmark of higher education sites of 2013 is particularly interesting and spotlights a wide variation in quality and efficiency between the institutions looked at. Testing is undertaken by Sitemorse using our specialised automated software that reads the first 125 pages of each site to generate a ranked table.

Why is this important?  Web users are notoriously fickle, 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 to University Campus Suffolk (UCS) which has held on to the top spot it managed in our previous survey in October. 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 8.38 out of a possible ten marks, way ahead of all but one other site tested.

Second in our league table this time is Crewe-based South Cheshire College with a score of 8.3, a good improvement on its score from Q4 2012 and a move of two places up the table.

Third is Bridgewater College in the heart of Somerset, which employs more than 1,000 staff to look after 15,000 full and part-time students. The college website scored 6.9 out of a possible ten marks.

The land-based Bishop Burton College at Beverley, near Hull has moved 38 places up our table and this time scores 6.6 /10, moving to fourth place. The college specialises in agricultural and equine courses.

Down to fifth 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 6.6/10.

Universities rising up the table this time include Hull (up 101 to 9th place), Stirling (up 2 to 26th), Birmingham (up 36 places to 28th position) Lincoln (up 13 to 35th), Edinburgh (up 95 to 38th position), Aberdeen (up 55 to 49th), Loughborough (up 37 to 55th) Glasgow Caledonian (up 75 places to 60th) Glyndwr (up 76 to 61st) Exeter, up 27 places to 72nd), York, (up 48 to 75th), Manchester Metropolitan, (up 11 to 82nd), East London (up 76 to 87th), Oxford Brookes (up 108 to 98th) and Brighton (up 114 to 105th).

Colleges climbing the table this time included Askham Bryan (up 162 places to 11th in the table), City College Birmingham (up 168 to 23rd) and Greenwich School of Management (up 194 places to 66th). Biggest fallers included West Cheshire College, down 125, Pembrokeshire College, down 131, London’s European Business School, down 162, and Bath Spa University, down 179 places to 248th place.

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.

The lowest-rated higher education websites in our table remain Kensington College of Business and City College, Coventry, which both scored less than 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 scorers on accessibility, all rated eight out of ten, were the University of Birmingham, University College, Birmingham and De Montfort University. 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, exactly the same result as Q4 2012.

Our conclusion:

From admissions to alumni activity, research to careers, university and college websites have never been so important. As well as being a shop window for the establishment when trawling for the best students – a harder task than ever given the background of rising fees and more government intervention in numbers of foreign students coming here - websites play a vital role in the curriculum and social activity for many thousands of students. So why are so many of them still full of errors?

Perhaps it’s time to increase staff numbers, budgets and the morale of those responsible for producing university and college sites. Until they are error-free and compliant with the law, they can never hope to fulfil their potential.