Some Common Pitfalls on College Web Sites by Professor Emeritus Elizabeth "Liz" Pollard Compuserve Address: 76702,1234 (Sysop, College and Adult Students Forum on CompuServe) Copyright 1997, by Elizabeth Pollard, all rights reserved. ============================================================================ Over the past few weeks, I've examined thousands of college Web sites, preparing for a workshop I will be leading in March of 1997 as part of the Seminar by the Sea presented by Topor Consulting Group International (see below for detail). Some patterns have really become obvious in the process, and I thought I'd present a few here. This is a sampling of some of the worst problems I've found. Some are fairly simple errors and easy to correct, others may require some ingenuity and policy interpretations at your campus. All, however, will affect the marketing effectiveness of your site, and NOT favorably! This is a small taste of issues we will be covering during the workshop! 1> Overuse of graphics ** Large graphic menus MUST have a text equivalent, presented either simultaneously or as an alternative. Especially in dial access mode, graphics tend to load very slowly and may be completely skipped by some users! If they are the ONLY source of hypertext links, the user has no way to navigate and will give up! One of the worst examples of this problem is the 200 or 300k opening graphic which is nothing but a logo or scenery, with no links present except ONE which leads the user to the REAL Home page! There is NO other way to get there! 2> Graphic menus with no links ** When this happens, it confuses the user, who EXPECTS menu items presented in a graphic form to have links, and not unreasonably so! The menu may be repeated in text form elsewhere on the page, but the user can easily miss it, since the graphic is more prominent. Such false leads waste a user's time and discourage further exploration! 3> Failure to provide clear, prominently placed, contact information. ** If you want users to contact you for further information, to apply for admission, or to make a donation, they MUST know how to do so, and the information must be simple to find or they will go elsewhere. Ideally, contact info should be available on EVERY page, but there should at least be clear pointers to a page where it may all be found. In some cases, there is NONE anywhere at the site! 4> Lack of convenient presentation of email addresses. ** Email contact info is especially conducive to rapid communications and convenience and therefore especially appealing to prospects who are already on the Web. Use it to your best advantage! Provide email links from your site to critical offices or individuals! If you present an email directory of faculty and/or staff, remember that most users will have no personal names to start with and provide index or search capability by department or position. Interactive forms which email automatically with the click of a mouse are nice, too, but since not all end user equipment and software is created equal, it's helpful also to provide an email address ON THE FORM in case the user CAN'T email directly from his browser. 5> Programming blunders that confuse the user and/or lead him astray. ** Examples: HOME button that goes nowhere or is difficult to identify; A BACK link that goes HOME instead; Links that have been allowed to go out of date. The moral of this story is that a professional to program the site or review it may be well worth the money which would otherwise be lost in admissions or donations which escape you! 6> Use of links from text without underlining, highlighting, or other obvious clues as to what they are. ** It just isn't nice to mislead people or give them no guidance at all! The user has to search for links to where he wants to go and will frequently give up in disgust! 7> Lack of organization, making it hard to navigate. ** A good example is the proliferation of added-on pages without a unifying theme, logo, or appearance to guide the user, and sometimes without clear connections to the home page. Each segment of the site should be connected clearly with navigational buttons, preferably placed uniformly on each page, and should have a unifying theme (graphic look, logo, or similar organization) to make the relationship clear! If the user doesn't know the page is yours, you lose a prospect! ============================================================================ The College Web Page Marketing Workshop is part of the ~~~ Seminar By The Sea: ~~~ Creating Successful Marketing Plans For Higher Education. Plus: Web Page Marketing. March 9-12, 1997, La Jolla, California Faculty: Bob Topor, Moshe Engleberg, Liz Pollard Topor Consulting Group, International Contact Liz Pollard 76702,1234 for more info. ---------- Barriers to Communication on Large Academic Web Sites by Professor Emeritus Elizabeth "Liz" Pollard CompuServe address: 76702,1234 (Sysop, College and Adult Students Forum on CompuServe) Copyright 1997, by Elizabeth Pollard, all rights reserved. ========================================================================== In any analysis of college Web site design and presentation problems, it's important to keep in mind the purposes for which these sites are constructed. The first is usually to communicate information to both internal and external users. Second, an institution wants to build and maintain its image with its public audiences, and third, or maybe really first, it uses a Web site to market itself to specific groups of users. These usually include potential students and their parents, alumni and other potential contributors, and the scholarly community from which it draws its own faculty. To accomplish this, a college or university must present its very best face to the world in a very new medium! The most common principles of organization used on such Web sites include the institution's own structure. This is perhaps the clearest guiding factor and often makes navigation the simplest. Another possible organization groups together pages of information similar in content, or appropriate to specific groups of users, such as present and future students, alumni, its own faculty and staff, news media, and interested visitors. Done carefully, this structure also pulls together effectively the units of the institution and presents its identity and image nicely. Whatever style of organization is used, the principles of good Web design must also be followed carefully so users will find what they need easily, and return regularly for updates and new information! To be most effective, the designers should follow the overall guides of simplicity, clarity, and logic in organization. They must identify the institution clearly with logo, name banner, contact information, and general design principles, and lead the user from page to page in a smooth and effective manner. Large institutions with unwieldy organizational structures often find it difficult to keep things simple, however, both in their own internal communications and at their Web sites. In their haste to be the first to present an attractive and useful site, thus showing their most current and technologically aware face to their constituencies, sometimes it appears they lose sight of the principles of organizational communications as well as those of good Web design. The temptation to attract and awe users with massive, impressive graphics, splashes of color, and the use of innovation is insidious. Unintended, barriers to communication creep in and obscure content! These barriers take the form of loss of logic and clarity, of hidden paths to crucial information, software errors and other technical problems, and design and structural barriers. The phenomenon is similar to the tendency in the early days of desktop publishing to overutilize the bells and whistles of the medium and obscure the purpose of communication! Information technology gurus on a campus often invite units to submit material. This is scanned in hastily, some graphics, audio, and other frills are added to it, hypertext links tie it loosely together, and the site is thrown up without coordination and without consulting with the experienced communications professionals in the public relations and marketing department! When this happens, the effect can be drastically disappointing and nearly useless as a marketing mechanism! I've pulled together below some examples of the ways such efforts can be ruined, as well as an example of one institution who did most things right to show the difference. I'll be discussing much of this, as well as other issues, in more detail in March at a workshop in La Jolla, California, presented by Topor Consulting Group, International. Details on that event are given at the end of this review in case you are interested in attending. HARVARD UNIVERSITY - http://www.harvard.edu Harvard has had difficulty, apparently, deciding just what image it wants to project at its Web site, although the current iteration is a big improvement over the first time I visited about a year ago. At that point, the graphics, aimed at an Ivy League image, and other embellishments overpowered the content of the pages, and there were many other problems, including navigational ones! The whole effect was scattered, and some elements were missing entirely. I eventually gave up in frustration and decided to come back later when they had their act together! A few months later, I visited again and was not surprised to see the Harvard Web team had started over. It looked very much as if they were trying to simplify and clarify, although much was still under construction. My third visit, a few weeks ago, was a pleasant surprise initially! The site is much clearer and more logical in organization, with a very straightforward alphabetical menu on the Home page. The same simple pattern is followed on many second level pages at the site, making navigation easier. The navigation clues are not always easily located, however, and on some pages, they're nonexistent! The Admissions page, for example, has NO navigation buttons, only a menu item to go HOME, placed, puzzlingly, in the MIDDLE of the list of links! For Harvard and other large schools, Admissions is not simple, since each college and school has its own Admissions office and rules. Hence, each college at Harvard has its own Admissions page. Here, however, a very helpful feature I found was a page with contact info for all the schools, including email addresses! Email addresses are much more difficult to come by elsewhere, though, as is other contact information. In most cases, it simply isn't available, and the email directory is searchable only by personal names, making it impossible to identify an individual for any purpose by department or position. The Home page and the second level pages at the site utilize identity clues like logo, color and typography to pull the image together. In particular, the "vines" symbol of Harvard's Veritas information network is quietly effective as an identity symbol. However, there is no logo or other unifying mechanism used beyond the second level pages in most cases, causing the image to fragment at that point. In many cases, there isn't even contact info present, and the even name of the institution isn't always obvious! Combined with the lack of navigation aids, this becomes very confusing and frustrating to a user, and I suspect the fact is that many are turned away by it, not a result to be desired in a marketing device! The current effort is a definite improvement, but the whole effect still leaves a general impression of indecision and inconsistency. The most distressing problem I noticed was the use of an extremely SMALL print on the alumni page! Here's a place where it's VERY important to make and keep friends, where former students, out in their productive business lives, often very successful and able to give something back to their alma mater, gather for the news and the comradeship of old classmates. Yet many of these people are very likely experiencing vision problems, as many people do at a more advanced age. A large proportion of them must be completely lost and antagonized by an "alumni" page which they probably can't even read! STANFORD UNIVERSITY - http://www.stanford.edu When you visit Stanford's Web site, you may want to take something like bread crumbs and leave a trail on the way in. :-( The Stanford Home page and the second level pages nearly all use a wonderful and colorful graphic of the campus, the university seal, and typography to present a unified image to the user. Beyond that level, however, the image falls apart almost completely, and so do the clues to navigating the site! The organization is also clear and simple on these two levels, but navigation clues are missing almost entirely even at this stage! There is no HOME button, or OTHER navigation buttons, in most cases. Instead, one must explore until the cursor is placed over the words "Stanford University" at the top of each page. At that point, an address shows at the bottom of the screen which is similar, but not identical, to the Home page address originally used (i.e., http://www.stanford.edu/#quad). If clicked, this does take the user back to the Home page usually - but, sadly, not always. It's as if navigation clues are an "inside secret," or a test of the user's ingenuity, rather than an aid to the visitor! One of the most startling errors I noticed is the lack of contact information on almost ALL pages at this site! There is NO address and phone, NO email address, NO fax number, on the Home page or at most subsequent levels. In addition, there is NO button or other link indicating where it may be found, as there is on some sites. By the time one gets to the Admissions pages, there IS contact information available, but by this time, one is 4 or 5 levels into the menus, far from an obvious location! Most users probably won't bother by this time. The only other place I found any such information was on the Alumni page, again buried several levels in, leaving the impression that the institution will only tell you where it is when it wants something from you, not an inviting image for visitors! Another disturbing discovery was made at the Alumni page, and similarly in some other places. It introduced a whole NEW identity, something called SOLAR. It was not immediately clear what this stands for, nor how it relates to Stanford, but there it was. There were also no clear links to the mother institution in other ways, since navigation aids at this unit were few and far between. The image established at the Home page was again completely missing here as well, another example of the fragmentation which plagues the whole effort! The general impression of this site is fragmented, uncoordinated. It appears that each unit has "done its own thing" and then been linked haphazardly to the main site after the fact. If there WAS any coordination by an individual or team it falls apart at the third level of menus, and it's fairly obvious that any attempt at presenting an image or establishing an identity for marketing purposes does the same thing. There are programming blunders at some levels which have never been corrected, something that coordination should have remedied at least. There is no consistency in identity, image, or navigation clues. The scariest thought may be that analyzing this site almost lays bare the inner workings of the institution, not something most organizations would wish! UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON - http://www.uh.edu The University of Houston site, while not perfect (who is?), leaves a much cleaner, clearer impression than the examples above. The Home page is clean and simple, with a staggered arrangement of small but effective graphics and text menu items arranged alphabetically. At the top or bottom of this and almost all subsequent pages is a button bar in the same colors and style, with the same or relevant buttons for each stage of the adventure at the site. This bar is especially interesting in that it does two things, both salutory in effect! It maintains a consistent image and identity on each page, and it effectively assists with navigation in the SAME manner and in a similar location at every step! Contact information (address, phone, fax, etc.) is immediately available at the bottom of the Home page, and it is repeated in the SAME place on most other pages at the whole site. There's no doubt here about the institution's identity, and its image is steadily being built by implication as well as specifically as one of education, information, and assistance. The phone and email directory is searchable only by personal names, as at most sites, but there is also a directory by department of faculty and staff, with position titles, campus addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. What a help that is for someone looking for a contact for further specific information! There are a few problems at the third menu level and beyond, as the "look and feel" of the Home page isn't always maintained. However, it is always clear who the sponsoring institution is and how to get where you need to be. The effect is consistency in identity, even if the image isn't always quite the same. Menu items throughout are titled clearly, and the expected contents follows when the button is clicked. Each page shows the user simply and clearly how to proceed and how to get back where s/he came from. While the University of Houston may not be as large or as rich in resources as a Harvard or a Stanford, its site will have the effect of drawing people to it and encouraging exploration. Chances are, it will also get them back, and its marketing purposes will be accomplished. Congratulations, and well done, Houston! ============================================================================ The College Web Page Marketing Workshop is part of the ~~~ Seminar By The Sea: ~~~ Creating Successful Marketing Plans For Higher Education. Plus: Web Page Marketing. March 9-12, 1997, La Jolla, California Faculty: Bob Topor, Moshe Engleberg, Liz Pollard Topor Consulting Group, International Contact Liz Pollard 76702,1234 for more info. ---------- Effective Ways to Promote Your Institution's Web Site by Elizabeth (Liz) Pollard ====================================================================== You and your institution have spent countless hours of effort and energy, not to mention dollars, building a Web site for your college or university. It's mounted on the World Wide Web, and you're happy with it. It presents your best face to the world, where millions of people can find it! Why shouldn't you be happy with that? If you have a counter on your Web site, what are the numbers telling you? How many people are finding their way to visit your virtual campus? Is it what you expected? Is it disappointing, but you don't know how to make it better? What can you do to publicize, to those millions of surfers, what your institution has to offer and show them where to find your site? Search Engines - You've entered your Web site in all the major search engines, if you're smart. You've used keywords that indicate your institution's name, its specialties, location, and other key factors about it. What happens when a prospective student or his parents look there for it? THOUSANDS of similar entries turn up! Yours is among them somewhere, but it's necessary to comb through page after page of other schools before anyone reaches yours! By that time, they may have found another institution which fits their needs! Links Lists - There are many lists of links available to prospective students, parents, alumni and donors. These are the places people will browse in hopes of finding something that interests them. Be sure to email the folks who keep such lists up to date to tell them about your site! Most such lists have an email link at the site that makes it simple to do so. Still, your school is one of hundreds or thousands of others on lists such as the comprehensive one by Christina DeMello. That list is located at (http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/cdemello/univ.html). That's not enough, unless your institution is Ivy League, a major state or private university, and in that case, many people are visiting you already! URL's in Published Materials - Be sure your URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is published on your business cards and stationery. Have it added to your next catalog printing. When you place ads in newspapers and magazines, place it prominently there. Focus on it in ALL your ads, in fact! This is the address where people can find you on the Web, and very conveniently! Tell them about it! Still, how many people ever see those cards, letters, catalogs and other publications with your URL on them? Chances are, most have already found you in some way if they're looking at catalogs and brochures. What else can you do to make your Web site more visible to the millions of Web users? Banner Ads! - There are many places on the Web that you can advertise free or very inexpensively. First, have a banner made that represents your site. Several Web based services can do this for a small fee. One of the fastest and most effective is Aarow Communications, (http://www.aarow.com). Their charge is $40, money well spent, as you can get lots of mileage from just one 40 x 400 pixel banner! The service surfs your site, keeps the look and feel, uses your logo if you wish, and creates an attractive banner for you. When placed on someone else's site, a banner calls attention to your institution and provides exposure to thousands or even millions of people who will never be reached through printed ads! As you probably know, many of these will be teenagers who would rather surf the Web any day than read! You can purchase space at individual sites which specialize in this at monthly rates that won't break the budget, too! One of these is BannerMall USA (http://www.aarow.com/mall.html). Do a little surfing yourself for malls which include education or learning centers. Consider a store front banner at any or all of them. This is a GREAT place to reach all those shoppers who are already in the mood to browse! Link Exchanges - Link exchanges can be one of the most effective ways to maximize your banner's mileage. These services display your banner in a rotating schedule at members' Web sites, with a link that lets users click on your banner and come right to your site. In exchange, you display the exchange's banner on your site, with a rotating display of banners for other sites appearing there. Most such services will not accept "adult" or pornographic sites, so there's no worrying that inappropriate ads will find their way to your Web site. Read the instructions carefully before you join to be sure, however. One very popular service of this type is the Internet Link Exchange (http://www.linkexchange.com). Their service is FREE, NO ad space to purchase, AND they will provide you with statistics on how many sites have displayed your banner, and how many people have clicked through to see your site! How can they do this? They hope to sell you wider distribution, of course, by giving you an opportunity to try their service free of charge, but the free service is good for displays on up to 100,000 sites! Other services, like the World's Top 1000 (Web Side Story) give you the opportunity to enter individual pages at your site, as long as you display their button on that page, which will lead users back to their site. No banner is required for this one, just the URL of the page you want to list in each category. There is no pushy display to this service, no ads for other sites, and it gives you the chance to highlight individual schools and colleges within your institution if you wish. Just enter the school's home page in an appropriate category when you join. Again, you can visit their site and pick up statistics on the effectiveness of the service any time, including your site's ranking among similar ones! In addition, it's a FREE service! How many magazines and newspapers do that for you? You can reach the Top 1000 at http://www.hitbox.com/wc/world.html. These are just a few starter ideas. The heart of the matter is that there are millions of possible visitors you can reach this way very inexpensively and maximize your institution's investment in the Web site! Who knows how many more applications and individual donations may result? - Liz Pollard Smoke Signals Enterprises http://www.smokesig.com Email: lpollard@smokesig.com ======================================================================== This article is from the July, 1997 issue of the _Marketing Higher Education_ newsletter, (http://www.smokesig.com/mhenewsl.html) a joint publication of Smoke Signals Enterprises and Topor Consulting Group International, and is reproduced here with permission. Copyright 1997 by Liz Pollard, Smoke Signals Enterprises. Not for redistribution without permission. ---------- End of Document