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Colleges Get Bad Grades For Web Sites
Prospective college students say, on average, university and college Web sites do not provide the information they need. BreathingLife.com Director of Operations Bonnie Matheney says higher education Web sites often have big files and badly placed scripts, as well as high-resolution pictures, which make downloads much longer. Her company intends to offer assistance and information to college and graduate applicants. Case Western Reserve University Dean of Admissions Bill Conley says college Web pages tend to be bandwidth-heavy because the schools have faster connections than their audiences, so even a focus group reviewing the site on campus will get a different picture than those elsewhere. Student Stacey Recarba researched schools online, and found, after waiting for the pages to download, that she could easily find information about the schools' athletic programs, but application information was much more difficult. Matheney notes that schools have so many different groups within themselves and so many different groups they want to reach that forming a coherent message can be a major challenge. She recommends that someone from the information services support staff be appointed Webmaster to track usage, assign URLs, and keep the system running. Reprinted with permission from Edupage |
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