According to alexa.com, Cambridge is slightly above Oxford in terms of web visitors, interestingly visitors to Oxford website stay longer, around 4 minutes compared to 3 minutes – either they have better content, or their site is harder to navigate, or people who visit ox.ac.uk read slower?
On all the sites about 60% of visitors look at just one page before moving on (start up pages?) and 30% of visitors are the result of web seaches.
American institutes get far more visitors than their UK cousins. Is the web used so much more extensively in America and what will be the consequences?
Alexa results for cam.ac.uk
Sites
cam.ac.uk
harvard.edu
ox.ac.uk
mit.edu
stanford.edu
Filed under: websites | Tagged: Cambridge University, Universities, websites |
Do you believe there are more people pay close attention to the American universities rather than the leading universities in Britain? I think that’s one reason why there are more visitors on the american university websites.
I think that American universities are much better at promoting themselves, and probably spend much more on their websites and have some better content. For example I know MIT have produced Opencourseware to make teaching materials available across the whole of the university. I noticed Harvard upload full lecture series to youtube. Cambridge have only just started to try and upload promotional materials to youtube in last year.
It might also be some bias in Alexa’s method? I don’t have much clue about how reliable their data is.
I don’t think it should be that people are paying far more attention to American Universities, that is because Cambridge has been ranked third (Shanghai Jiao Tong University Ranking) or second (Times educational supplement).
The US universities have to promote themselves better since IIRC they don’t get central government funding and rely heavily on student payments, sponsorship and alumni donations to keep them running.
Also, as a university-based web dude it irks me that http://cam.ac.uk/ is a 404 and that http://www.cambridge.ac.uk/ doesn’t redirect 🙂