Joe's "State of the Web sites" Address, Part I

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Joe's "State of the Web sites" Address, Part I

1/21/2004

By Terry Calhoun

Terry Calhoun, IT Trends Commentator
Society for College and University Planning (SCUP)
University of Michigan

Last summer, some folks at the University of Oregon conducted a comparative study of 127 university Web sites to analyze technical and design trends. You might think that the results of such a study would not be appropriate for an "opinion" piece, but you would be wrong - especially if the report is written by J'e St Sauver. J

His opinions come through loud and clear, and when I briefly browsed the report, I thought it would be not only of interest, but with J'e's commentary, count as an opinion piece, too. Part I, in this issue of IT Trends, covers methodology, Web server software used, natural minimum Web page size, and the trend toward segmenting Web sites into "domains" for various user types, such as prospective students, alums, staff, etc. The first half of J'e's report covers these areas and it follows. Enjoy!

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J'e St. Sauver
University of Oregon Computing Center

Study Sample

The schools selected for study consisted of the set of all AAU universities (http://www.aau.edu/aau/members.html), all Tier 2 or better national doctoral universities from the 2002 US News and World Report university rankings, and a small number of other colleges and universities which were traditional comparators or otherwise locally nominated for inclusion.

A study sample dominated by national doctoral universities may do a poor job of capturing Web trends associated with other higher education segments, such as four-year liberal arts colleges or two-year community colleges (although there may be more commonality across those segments than you might think). Virtually all Web sites are in a state of constant change, so what we saw at a given site six months ago may not bear any resemblance to what's there now.

In spite of those stipulated limitations, we believe that many sites have tremendous curiosity about what their peers are doing online, and we hope that the results of this study will at least provide a foundation for productive local discussions.

Web Server Software

As part of our study, we "fingerprinted" the primary Web server running at each study site using Internet Periscope
( http://www.lokbox.net/InternetPeriscope.asp ), curious to see what software the study schools were running. (Choice of Web server software can materially affect the sort of Web site features Web designers can deploy, as well as the security and performance of the site, etc.). Our 172 study sites, 70.3 percent were running Apache, 12.2 percent were running Microsoft IIS, and 11 percent were running Netscape Enterprise, with a handful of other less popular Web servers (WebStar, Lotus Domino, OSU Web Server and IBM HTTP Server) also being seen. Most large universities ran Apache for their Web server, with Microsoft IIS generally being associated with smaller or religiously affiliated schools.