As a part of my employment, I look up hundreds (no exaggeration) of education websites - colleges, universities, trade schools and high schools. Day in, day out; tons of 'em. And I have found many, many problems.
- No "Contact Us" page, form or email address, or it only has phone numbers (or, worse, just snail mail addresses). We are online - post a dang email address!
- Search is through Google but is not set up properly, so results are not just confined to the domain.
- Nebulous/misleading headers or tabs with names that aren't terribly descriptive (e. g. "Alumni" or "Services"). Hence I end up using search a lot of the time.
- Dead links.
- Dead email addresses.
- Ugly flash animation.
- It's a hunt to find where a school is actually located (I've had to sometimes resort to Google to find an address).
- Blogs that are not updated.
- Weird images (and they have to load, of course), usually of smiling students which were likely added in order to prettify the site but instead just clog it up and can rapidly be outdated.
- No way to contact the webmaster in order to report website problems.
Gaahhh.
PS Lots of people have no freakin' clue as to how to update a website. I swear, this could be work, and it's mostly easy, too.
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