Your Higher Education Marketing Link of the Week… Bates College: A Most Unusual Home Page… 10 March 2023

4 Key Points on the Home Page + a Bates College Celebration

Bates CollegeBates CollegeAt most colleges and universities it is difficult to abandon the effort to cram as much content as possible on the home page. Limit content to key tasks for potential students? Difficult.

On the Bates home page today is a notable hero feature to celebrate the selection of a new president. Understandable, for sure.

Immediately after are 3 key task links for potential students: (1) Future Students, (2) Academic Programs, and (3) Virtual Campus Tours.

Adding a link to cost and affordability content would be close to perfection especially as Bates uses the 7-step MyinTuition personal cost estimator.

At some point the current 4th “Presidential Announcement” will disappear. We’ll see what replaces that as we suspect the 4-link design will continue as it has at least since 2016.

An historical note…

We first selected the Bates home page in February 2016, with the note that it was “a truly minimalist home page that shines in a world of clutter” compared to other higher education home pages. In 2021 we added that there was “More on the page now in 2021 but it still opened with ‘4 Key Topics’ as it had 5 years earlier.

That rare continuity over time is a design feature that deserves a special commendation. What we have here is continuing adaptation with falling into the need for major change just to make major change.

Follow the Link of the Week…

Visit a most unusual home page that combines a notable celebration event with key task links and Instagram features on the Bates College home page.

Speed on mobile… 3.0 seconds to first view, 10.6 seconds to full interactivity

Google PageSpeed Insights measures the time to first view on a mobile phone at an “OK” 3 seconds. Time to full interactivity was a slower 10.6 seconds.

The first step to improving mobile speed was again: “Eliminate render-blocking resources.”

Website Carbon Calculator… A 65% “Hurrah” rating

Thanks to Gerry McGovern and his efforts to reduce “world wide waste” for the referral.

The Bates College rating of “cleaner than 65% of web pages tested” is better than many but others have been even stronger.

Does your website help or hurt the climate? Test your website pages at “Website Carbon Calculator.”

Recommend a future Link of the Week

Always eager to get recommendations of websites that dare to be different… or just do something ordinary in a special way. Write a comment with link here or send me the link at bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com.

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