What makes a great business school website?

What makes a great business school website?

Monday, 01 October 2007 00:00

Don’t put the Dean on the home page, make sure you have an easy to access and working site search tool and content is probably more important than design – three of the main findings from the new ABS/CarringtonCrisp study of business school websites.

The Web Works project evaluated 18 UK business school websites across ten key performance criteria and 30 further criteria dealing with access to and interest in the information provided. Interactive focus groups were held with 270 current and prospective students to gather data.

Andrew Crisp from CarringtonCrisp comments “The home page of a website is like the most expensive piece of real estate in a city, but instead of just putting luxury flats on the site, you need to build mixed use, appealing to a variety of different audiences and still turn a profit. Get it wrong, and your reputation may decline quickly and internationally”.

Two-thirds of students say the internet is helpful in finding out about university or business schools and just under half agree or strongly agree that it is their primary source of information when deciding where to study. Google list tens of millions responses to a search request for MBA.

Jonathan Slack at ABS adds “Various studies in recent years have shown the growing importance of websites for business schools, especially for student recruitment. We proposed the Web Works project to give our members a sense of best practice when it comes to their web investment”.

The top two sites in the study were Bradford and Cass. Although very different in style they both made it very easy for the user to quickly reach the information they wanted from the site home page. Both sites also had good information on careers and alumni which wasn’t restricted to those already at the school or past graduates.

One of the most important findings from the study was the preference among users to search sites rather than use navigation. Each site tends to use slightly different language to describe similar courses. Rather than learn a new language on each site they visit or spend time working through navigation, users indicated that they search for phrases they understand and then work from the search results.