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Press Release from Primary Research Group, Inc.
North American colleges spent a mean of nearly $28,000 on
website development consulting fees in the 2006-07 academic
year, according to The Survey of College Website Management
Practices, just published by Primary Research Group. The 171-
page study presents more than 500 tables of data about college
websites, and is based on data from 68 North American colleges.
Just a few of the study’s hundreds of findings are that:
29.41% of the colleges in the sample had a policy in place
to communicate in a crisis with students, faculty and staff
through text messaging to cell phones.
About 22% of the webmasters in the survey use Apple/Mac as
a main supplier of personal computers or workstations.
Lumnis was the most commonly used type of portal software,
used by 47.83% of those that reported use of a portal
software.
45.6% of the colleges in the sample allow postings for faculty
and staff blogs.
The webmaster was the main training provider for 48.39% of
web staffs reporting, while others on the web staff were the
main trainers for 32.56% of survey participants. For 19.35% of
those surveyed, another unit of the college handled training.
Thirty seven percent of public college webmasters review
departmental or division sites every 1-2 years.
Significantly less than half of the colleges in the sample,
43.75%, required all college websites to conform to a single
graphic style
68.52% of the colleges in the sample used a content
management system for departmental web pages.
The mean number of students employed by the college web
staff was only 0.99 and the mean was only 0.50, and no
college employed more than six students on the web staff.
Most college had at least one website editor, and the mean
number per college was 1.05.
Close to 45% of respondents said that the most important
person for initiating major website changes was a college
official in the public affairs/university marketing department
(or similar such department such as External Relations).
Only about 16% of colleges allowed deans to change the website without prior clearance.
PHD-level/research universities vastly outspent others,
averaging almost $263,000 in salary spending for the web
staff.
More than 13% of the web staffs in the sample receive primary
or ancillary finding from specific campus services or
functional units, such as The Department of Public Relations,
in addition to or rather than directly from the college
administration.
More than 58% of the colleges in the sample had a centralized
web governance structure. Private colleges were much more
likely than public colleges to have a centralized structure, by
which we mean a structure that concentrates decision-making
power in a centralized locus rather than dispersing it among
several webmasters or authority centers.
The 68-college sample has nine community colleges, 41 BA/MA
level colleges, and eighteen PHD-level or research universities.
Mean enrollment FTE for the public colleges in the sample was
13,419; for the private colleges, 4,103.
The report is available from Primary Research Group for $249.00.
For more information contact Primary Research Group at 212-
736-2316 or view our website at www.primaryresearch.com.
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