Your Higher Education Marketing Link of the Week… University of Kentucky: Finding Your Major… 19 May 2017

4 Options to Find Your Academic Major

University of Kentucky AcademicsIn the top task research we do, potential students always tell us that learning what academic programs are offered is high on the task list as people visit college and university websites. Making that list easy to find and quick to review is a critical web design goal. And what about people who have an idea of what they want to do after graduation but are not quite sure about the major that will best fit that career goal?

On either desktop or mobile, you can’t miss the opening words here: “Let’s find a major or degree program that fits you.” Right after that in just seconds you’ll see the four choices:

“I like to… ” leads to 10 life-style choices (“solve problems” & “crunch numbers” are two) used to sort majors.

“I want to be a… ” lets you type in a career/work preference for another sort.

“I’m searching for… ” lets people put in a specific major. (Architecture, for instance, returns 5 possibilities.)

“Browse all categories… ” takes visitors to a slowly unfolding series of images that eventually displays all the majors available. There’s an option here to show a simple alpha list. That just might be a better way to show all the availabilities.

Do you wonder, as I do, which of these paths gets the most travel from first-time visitors?

On Mobile…

For smartphone visitors, Google gives this site a “poor” rating of 52/100 for Speed (and a slightly better 65/100 if using a desktop computer) and a strong 99/100 for Mobile Friendliness once content downloads. Google warns that “Nearly half of all visitors will leave a mobile site if the pages don’t download within 3 seconds.”

Follow the Link of the Week

Visit an academic programs page that seeks to personalize the visitor experience at the University of Kentucky Link of the Week selection.

Link of the Week Archive

Regular readers will notice that the Link of the Week selection now appear with my blog. To review initial 2016 selections and previous years visit the Link of the Week archive page.

2 Comments

  1. Very cool webapp that UK has developed here. Puts a really nice twist on typical major and program lists.

    On a related note, you should consider moving away from that Google PageSpeed metric. It’s really only a reference point like all automated testing tools and it makes good sites look bad.

    It focuses more on front end code optimization than things like server hardware, server configuration, db caching, location, etc. and other real world factors. Amazon scores a 65/100 and they host Netflix for instance so that’s not exactly telling of their capabilities and speed.

    https://www.absentdata.com/blog/google-page-speed-insights-accurate/

  2. Brian, thanks for your note and the link to the Test My Site critique. For sure Google has not achieved perfection here. For now I’ll continue using it as it does allow comparison among different websites.

    That said, I’m open to exploring easy-to-access alternatives. Send along any links to visit. And with any luck, someone else reading this will do the same.

    My main reason for including this is to boost interest in website speed performance. I find that too many people creating websites are just not concerned about speed. (With notable exceptions like the people at California Lutheran University). And that is a serious marketing mistake.

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