Web Site Evaluation - First Impressions, Navigation, Content

Introduction

Kwantlen Polytechnic University (commonly abbreviated to Kwantlen), University of the Fraser Valley (UFV), and Thompson Riverss University (TRU) are public degree-granting undergraduate universities, offering educational programs and services in British Columbia, Canada.

This report evaluates the effectiveness and efficiency of these three universities' websites: www.ufv.ca, www.kwantlen.ca, and www.tru.ca. in terms of attracting new students, using the module developed by Management Centre International Ltd (MCIL), a well known British company that provides IT focused management training, consultation, conferences and books.

The module designed by MCIL provides “a structured way to establish how well the website is performing”. The review process is “conducted by examining 10 sets of criteria: First Impressions, Navigation, Content, Attractors, Findability, Making Contact, Browser Compatibility, Knowledge of Users, User Satisfaction, and Other Useful Information”. Under each set of the criteria, there are key issues to be considered.

In this report, the evaluation is only focused on the first three criteria with 28 key points. A checklist downloaded from MCIL’s website is tailored to suit the reporting requirement. The checklist was used in a comparative way with three institutes in three separated column. “Each institute was scored for each website issue out of ten, where 0 is not applicable at all, 1 is extremely poorly represented and 10 is extremely well represented”. At the end, totaling scores for each section for each column will provide a rough indication of the effectiveness of each website. The complete tailored checklist with scores is available in the Appendix.

Overview of the Comparison by Criteria

1. First Impression

“First impressions are critical to a website. Web users form first impressions of web pages in as little as 50 milliseconds (1/20th of a second), according to Canadian researchers. In the blink of an eye, web surfers make nearly instantaneous judgments of a web site's "visual appeal."” First impressions can influence subsequent judgments of website credibility and buying decisions.

Nine key performances are reviewed to compare the three university websites in the checklist. Kwantlen University out performs UFV by 5 points, TRU by 11 points, with