Northern Michigan University – Episode #267
Site Scores:
| Site | Visual | Information | Code | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Northern Michigan University | 83 | 80 | 78 | (241/300) 80% B- |
Today’s Tip:
Remember, not everyone has blazing fast internet as you are accustom to at your institution or home. There are still a lot of people with either slow or unreliable connections. Ensure your site and applications are fault tolerant when it comes to dropping a connection or slow response from a device. Nothing it more annoying to an end user when they have to re-do tasks because an error message pops up and the user looses the work they did.
Show Notes:
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Tags: episode
August 31st, 2011 at 3:26 pm
I just wanted to thank you for taking a look at the NMU website. You’ve inspired me to finish converting some of NMU’s top-level pages the new NMU design. Because these pages are not owned by a specific department and don’t often generate a lot of traffic in web analytics, it is easy to overlook them sometimes even though they are linked from the homepage. I’m also going to take a look a feedburner to help manage the university’s RSS feeds. We don’t change them often, but getting some subscriber information would be helpful.
One last thing, analytic data for the university website for the year of 2009 indicated that less than 1% of our website visitors were using dialup or slower internet connections. Although NMU is located in a remote part of Michigan, we’ve been consistently recognized for our technology initiatives. One of those initiatives involved providing WiMAX coverage to many of the regions surrounding the campus. This coverage is not just for students, we open it up to municipalities and regional schools as well. This means that a large portion of the prospective NMU student population has the ability to interact with our website on a fast and reliable connection. It is this initiative that prompted President Obama to visit the campus in February of 2011. That said, we’re always striving to balance website speed with features that will attract prospective students and appreciate the tips on how we can improve.
September 3rd, 2011 at 7:45 am
Eric,
That is awesome! Thanks for your insights and VERy quick response to my initial thoughts about the site. It is hard to get an in depth review of an entire university website in just 10 minutes.
I have heard great things about your WiMAX implementation and am really glad you are looking at your analytics for this fact and reacting to it. Of course every campus has their unique audience and visitors and tailoring your site to them should take center stage over anything else.
Keep up the rock star work!