Archive for 'Website'

Tim Ash is all about conversion. He makes a living helping clients optimize their online presence so they can successfully convert initial interest into customers. And he especially worries about homepages.

“Your poor overloaded homepage,” he writes in a recent ClickZ column. “Just like Atlas, it carries the weight of the world on its shoulders. Under the staggering load of all this content, your homepage is groaning and not fulfilling its purpose.”

By trying to serve everyone, the homepage often becomes a confusing and jumbled mess, says Ash. “Unfortunately, the bottom line for you is lower conversion rates.”

He offers a few remedies:

- Begin with the end in mind. The purpose of the homepage is to get people off the homepage. It should ...

Your website may not be everything you want it to be, but is it guilty of gluttony, envy, lust, pride, sloth, anger and greed? Seth Rosenblatt has seen enough sinful sites to be suspicious, so the president of online content company Interwoven offers the following warnings:

- Gluttony. “Websites are often gluttons of content,” he writes, “featuring too much stuff — a cluttered design, too many links or a layout that looks like it was designed by committee.”

- Envy. “This often translates to the temptation to imitate others. Trying new ideas should be encouraged, but remember the fundamentals — Who are your visitors? What are they looking for? What content and technology helps them walk down a certain path?”

- Lust. “Sites ...

It seems that people can’t get enough online video, which is why more and more websites are relying on video content to sell products and tell stories.

“The advantages of video are clear,” writes Internet marketer Mark Bonfigli. “It’s a way to differentiate your website from competitors…and it addresses the large percentage of consumers who are visually oriented and will almost always choose to watch a video rather than read.”

Using video to market your school, its programs and people is becoming a necessity, but Bonfigli warns against rushing into production without following some common-sense rules:

- Keep videos short. “In general, they should range anywhere from one to three minutes. Any longer and visitor attention may start to wane.”

- Keep them simple. ...

Sometimes we get so hung up on hard numbers and so infatuated with analytics that we overlook the value of human response. Take our websites, for example.

While tools like Google Analytics and WebTrends can help determine the effectiveness of your site, page visits and click-throughs tell only part of the story, says Adrienne Bartlett.

“Anecdotal feedback can help fill in the blanks,” she wrote in one of her weekly XpertTips to customers and followers of TargetX. “Here are a few opportunities you may be missing.”

- Provide a link right on the page for visitors to comment and/or make content requests.

- Ask visiting prospective students and families to give you feedback on their online registration process. Did you give them sufficient information ...

College websites are favorite punching bags of Internet experts — partly because the sites are so critically important in student recruitment and partly because they’re so easy to punch holes in, as Neil Raisman reminded us in last week’s Email Minute.

But in a gesture that should soothe the psyche of higher-ed webmasters and designers, there’s now an award to celebrate the best in college websites. eduStyle has announced the 1st Annual Higher-ed Web Awards, in a total of 35 categories, to recognize the most innovative and exciting developments in higher education web development.

eduStyle is a self-described “web design gallery dedicated to higher education websites and powered by higher education web design professionals.” The aim of eduStyle, explains founder Stewart Foss, ...

College websites drive Neil Raisman crazy. Hard to navigate, loaded with out-of-date information, written in academic jargon, offering links that don’t work and pages that don’t exist, referring visitors to information they’re not allowed to view.

And on top of that, says Raisman, many look like they were winners of a contest to find the most amateurish design.

All of that may sound harsh, he says, “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.”

Raisman is a former college president, dean and faculty member who now heads a company that helps schools and businesses improve their customer service. So he is especially sensitive when a ...

Tracking your readers’ eye movements as they view your web pages is a great way to determine whether your design is working the way you intended. But scientific eye-tracking requires expensive equipment and trained technicians, so Christina Laun has saved you the trouble.

The web designer has translated the results of several eye-tracking studies into what she calls 23 actionable lessons to improve the design of your website. Here’s a sampling:

- Text attracts attention before graphics. Contrary to prevailing thought, images are not the first thing readers look at on a website. Most users come to your site for information — plain old text.

- Users look at the top left before moving down and to the right. People generally scan web ...

Admissions websites still get no respect at budget time, according to a recent report from higher education research firm Eduventures.

Even though websites have long been viewed as one of the most popular and trusted sources of information for prospective students, admissions offices continue to allocate a small percentage of their overall marketing budgets to them, says the report, “Maximizing the Effectiveness of the Admissions Web Site.”

Researchers found that admissions offices spend, on average, just 12 percent of their marketing budgets each year on enhancing and maintaining their websites.

“Given that we know the admissions website ranks as the most important channel through which colleges communicate with prospective students, we would expect institutions to be apportioning a relatively large share of their ...

There’s nothing as certain as a website redesign. It doesn’t matter how recently the last one took place, there are faculty, alumni and students already pushing for the next one.

So web expert Karine Joly is offering a series of tips for a successful redesign of your site in the December issue of University Business.

Joly, who authors the popular collegewebeditor blog, calls on a number of higher ed web professionals for their recommendations. Some of the best include:

- Invite feedback, but avoid redesign by committee. It’s important to get as much buy-in as you can before and during the process, but democratic redesigns do not work very often. Consult with key constituencies — just make sure they know they have input, ...

The nation’s colleges did worse on their website final exam this year, proving again that high school students are tough graders.

For the ninth straight year, the National Research Center for College & University Admissions surveyed more than 100,000 college-bound students and asked them to rate admissions websites. Even when graded on a generous curve, the results were not good.

Only 140 A’s, along with 713 B’s, 1,369 C’s, 635 D’s and 230 F’s. No sites scored in the 90′s or 80′s on the 100-point scale, only 16 scored in the 70′s, and nearly one third of the schools earned scores in the 50′s or 60′s.

“Overall, approval ratings of college and university websites have continued to decline over the last several years,” ...

If you’re not convinced that interactivity is a key to student recruitment, take a look at the new website unveiled this week by Loyola University Chicago.

An interdepartmental team spent the past 10 months reinventing the site “with new features and technology that add interactivity and improve navigation,” according to a university press release. Highlights include:

- LU Tube, a collection of videos that tell Loyola’s story from different perspectives.

- Blog Around the World, a series of ongoing entries from a dozen students, staff and alumni “living the Loyola mission throughout the world.”

- An interactive university timeline that lets you choose bits of history from any decade since the university’s founding.

- A special microsite for prospective undergrads and their parents.

“The new design ...

As a communications professional, Colleen Ware’s reaction to the March 2nd Email Minute was understandable — “Isn’t answering the question, ‘What’s in it for me?’ the burden of anyone and everyone who is trying to sell, convince or persuade others?”

But as a higher education veteran, she knows better than that — conceding that college websites and publications are notorious for highlighting features and ignoring benefits.

So Ware and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota decided they weren’t going to make the same mistakes when overhauling the College of Liberal Arts website for prospective students.

“First,” explains the CLA editor, “we took to heart the things we’d heard from the Email Minute and other sources — that this audience is interested in ...

One of the world’s great newsgathering organizations is a little behind the times. The Associated Press recently wrote a story telling readers what you could have told them a couple years ago:

“Online Recruiting Grows for Colleges”

AP reporter Heather Hollingsworth wrote about “web-based recruitment strategies that colleges across the country are employing as they attempt to lure tech-savvy high schoolers to their campus.”

The article focused on the growing importance of college websites in student recruiting, citing one of many studies showing that students rank the website at or near the top of factors they use when evaluating a school.

That’s old news. What Hollingsworth didn’t mention is that online recruiting has gone beyond “beefing up the website,” as she put it. It’s ...

Most colleges are breaking the law in California. A study by Bentley College shows that two-thirds of the nation’s schools fail to comply with the Golden State’s “Online Privacy Protection Act.”

The law requires any organization that collects personal information online from California residents to post a privacy policy. A nationwide survey of 236 colleges found that just 28 percent had privacy notices linked from their home pages, and another 8 percent had privacy statements accessible through a search of the site.

The results are troubling to the report’s author, Bentley management professor Mary J. Culnan. Especially because all 236 institutions had at least one web form collecting personal data, sometimes including credit card information and social security numbers.

“We hope this survey ...