Yes, You Can: A Fast & Creative Higher Education Home Page at Middlebury College
We’ve preached the “need for speed” for years. And years.
Making a positive impression on potential students visiting for the first time starts with a fast website. Can’t be too fast. When landing pages take more than 5 seconds to download, visitors are lost. And yet very few higher education websites (and the agencies that often create them) pay serious attention to making the sites work fast. Especially if “fast” is seen an an impediment to “creativity.”
Today’s Link of the Week selection shows that you can be both fast and creative. The Middlebury College home page is both creative and fast.
Visit to experience the creative element… an unfolding dotted line that leads you through 9 click points, starting with “Why Middlebury” and ending at “Graduate and Professional Schools.” As you move along you’ll pass over several background videos in the background.
Will this home page win design awards? Who knows. It does deserve special attention as a rare higher education home page that combines mobile speed with creative content links.
A marketing opportunity…
Of course, there is a marvelous marketing opportunity here to learn which of the 9 topics are most often visited by people coming to the site for the first time.
Follow the Link of the Week…
See how higher education home pages can be both creative and fast when you visit the Middlebury College home page.
Speed on mobile… 2.7 seconds to first view, 3.4 seconds to full interactivity
Google PageSpeed Insights measures the time to first view of the Middlebury home page on a mobile phone at a rapid 2.7 seconds. Time to full interactivity, compared to nearly all higher education sites, was a very fast 3.4 seconds.
Things can always be faster. The first step to improving this mobile speed: “Eliminate render-blocking resources.”
Website Carbon Calculator… cleaner than most
Thanks to Gerry McGovern and his efforts to reduce “world wide waste” for the referral.
The Middlebury College home page is “cleaner than 67% of web pages tested.”
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.