University Business - February 2008 - (Page 23)

VIEWPOINT I’ll Bet You Made That Yourself College and university websites aren’t meeting user needs or acting as eﬀective marketing tools By Neal Raisman I T IS WIDELY RECOGNIZED that a college website should accomplish two major tasks—provide customer service for the needs of users and market the school. Unfortunately, a random survey I recently completed of 50 not-for-proﬁt and for-proﬁt college and university websites shows that most of the sites accomplish neither task and don’t serve the potential student or college well at all. Discussions with students while consulting on customer service issues revealed website opinions ranging from “Okay, I guess” to “Looks like #%$*.” “Okay” is not good enough and, well, the other end of the range needs no comment. So what speciﬁcally is wrong with the sites? First, they are often hard to navigate (some were even close to impossible). Second, they are written too often in academic jargon for the wrong audience. And third, they look like the college had a contest and chose the most amateurish design to use. Perhaps that sounds harsh, but prospective students are deciding to skip schools because of their reaction to the website more often than the admissions departments would ever want to know. NAVIGATING IN TROUBLED WATERS Out of the 50 sites reviewed, all but two were diﬃcult to navigate. Website navigation should be intuitive for the viewer if schools are to provide the service levels that will keep the viewer engaged at the site. Thirty-eight of the sites were organized in a counterintuitive manner, forcing viewers to sail from one page to another and often yet another to ﬁnd information, if they It was as if the president was off-limits to students and parents, or was hiding from people. could ﬁnd it at all. This is not to say that the information is not somewhere on the site. It is just buried, sending viewers on a treasure hunt. Serious ﬂaws rendered 28 sites unnavigable or quite diﬃcult to navigate. And 18 sites contained broken links. Six actually would allow you to get to a page you sought but then would not allow you to leave the page. Four others had no link to allow a viewer to return to the home page after reading other pages. Hitting the back button many times was necessary to get back home. What message does a website with such basic ﬂaws send to the viewer who may be thinking about applying? Not a good one—especially if the person is a potential computer science, design, or marketing major. It is embarrassing and disheartening to see such basic ﬂaws in a college website that could be easily checked and ﬁxed with a simple program such as EcollegeWebCheck, available through Core Data Center (www.coredatacenter.com), a web design and online marketing ﬁrm serving higher ed and other industries. MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR FLAWS An even larger problem was the lack of readily available information on the sites. Only six of the 50 sites reviewed made information important to students and parents available. Of course, some of this may well go back to the navigation issues. It is there somewhere, but where? One common problem reminded me of Where’s Waldo?, with the institution’s president playing the part of Waldo. Twenty-seven sites made it next to impossible to get in touch with the president Neal Raisman is president of AcademicMAPS, a consultancy specializing in customer service in higher education. His book is Embrace the Oxymoron: Customer Service in Higher Education (LRP Publishers, 2002). universitybusiness.com February 2008 | 23 http://www.coredatacenter.com http://universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - February 2008

University Business - February 2008
Contents
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Editor's Note
Stats Watch
Sense of Place
Viewpoint
Future Shock
Independent Outlook
On the Hill
Facilities Focus
Cover Story: Orientation Rites: Seal the Deal
A Sense of Security
Growing the Giving Tree
Are We Covered?
Baby Boomers, Back to Campus
Internet Technology
What's New
Calendar of Events
End Note

University Business - February 2008