Your Higher Education Marketing Link of the Week… Medill School: Fabulously Fast Home Page… 6 October 2017

Rare Attention to Speed at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications: 3 Second Mobile Download

Medill School Northwestern UniversityOne element puts the Medill School into the Link of the Week selection category: Mobile download speed.

At a time when most colleges and universities are not paying much attention to the value of speed in the mobile world, the Medill School at Northwestern University stands out with the fastest speed report we’ve tested yet on Google’s Test My Site service. The site is new, just going into service sometime in the last few weeks.

The folks at Medill want to be sure potential students in their inquiry pool are aware of the new site. An October 2 email from Karla Davis, director of graduate admissions and financial aid at Medill, told recipients that:

  • “We are excited to share Medill’s new website with you. The site is designed for you, someone who is considering Medill. It’s now even easier for you to explore our programs, meet our faculty, students and alumni, and learn how a Medill master’s degree can help you accelerate your career.”

Speed Counts… 3 seconds beats 17 seconds

In a higher education marketing world where competition is only increasing, speed counts. Medill shows that it is possible to create a new website using the latest design elements and still achieve an excellent mobile speed time. For potential students visiting for the first time from a smartphone, fast sites will have an advantage over slower ones.

Compare the 3 second rating with the mobile download speed of home pages at Loyola Marymount University (17 seconds, estimated 35 percent visitor loss) and University of California – San Diego (15 seconds, estimated 32 percent visitor loss).

On Mobile…

A speed rating of 3 seconds leaves Google speechless about an exact percent of visitors who will leave before a mobile download is complete. In a recent test of a site that took 4 seconds to complete (at Bennington College) the estimate of lost visitors was 10 percent. For the Medill school, loss is described only as “low.”

Follow the Link of the Week

To visit the fastest mobile homepage we’ve yet tested, go to the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.

Content Marketing: Focus Website Design on Top Tasks

Join 529 people on the Top Tasks: Higher Education Website Content group on LinkedIn. Request membership here.

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

Leave a Reply to Bob Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *