First month with the new site

Yesterday was December 2nd. We launched the new site on November 2nd. So as of today, I have one solid month of data on the new site available in Google Analytics. Let’s take a look at how we’re doing compared to November 3rd through December 3rd of last year. The dates don’t match up exactly so that we start on a Monday and end on a Tuesday with both date ranges.

• Visits up 27.53%
• Unique Visitors up 89.16%
• Page views up 38.51%
• Average page views up 8.61%
• Average time on site up 22.44%
• Bounce rate down 46.09%
• Percentage of new visits up 90.69%

These are all positive changes. Bounce rate is a bad thing, so seeing that number go down is good. We’re reaching more people, who are looking at more pages and spending longer stretches of time before leaving. But I’m not ready to say all this is due to the redesign. After all, we’ve seen a significant enrollment increase this semester, so all these numbers should be improved over a year ago.

So let’s also compare the first month with the new site to a similar date range the month previous; 11/02/2009 through 12/02/2009 compared to 9/28/2009 through 10/28/2009, again starting on a Monday and ending on a Tuesday.

• Visits up 0.22%
• Unique Visitors up 15.27%
• Page views up 30.01%
• Average page views up 29.72%
• Average time on site up 41.74%
• Bounce rate down 51.39%
• Percentage of new visits up 35.89%

This comparison is less straight forward. The new site has Thanksgiving break in this data set where the old site has no breaks, which would seem to put the new site at a disadvantage. But the old site’s figures come before registration opened up for the Spring, so in other ways it’s at a disadvantage. In other words, don’t read too much into this comparison.

It does help make it clear that the sorts of metrics tied to raw traffic have little to do with the redesign. The percentage change in visits is virtually zero. But metrics that measure engagement, such as time on site and bounce rate, actually show more improvement against a month ago than they do against a year ago. This probably helps show the natural boost we get thanks to registration opening up this time of year. When we’re talking about aggregate data it’s important to keep in mind all the variables that have nothing to do with the design of the site.

I’m more comfortable attributing large shifts in metrics for specific sections of site content that have been significantly overhauled as part of the redesign. For example, the list of our programs of study saw an increase in visits of 502.65% and an increase in unique visitors of 290.45% compared to figures for October of this year. Compared to a year ago, the difference is 548.75% increase in visits, 333.29% increase in unique visitors. One of my primary goals with the redesign was to increase the visibility of this content because I think it’s an important part of the “shopping” process. I think we can safely call that a success.

Don't mind me

I just need some links from a non Vol State domain to test the custom 404 page.

• broken link
• html to php change
• invalid page, valid directory
• invalid page, invalid directory

The Culture of Technological Abundance

In one of my computer science courses the instructor asked if computing resources have reached the point where efficiency can safely be ignored. I responded with a resounding “No!” but some of the younger pups in the class disagreed. I'm begging to think I was showing my age, at least within certain contexts.

Something in my brain makes me love the idea of optimization. I actually police myself away from it, but I still find myself spending hours upon hours thinking about “better ways” to do things. I was recently debating with myself about storing telephone numbers in a database as integers vs. strings. I found the integer approach most appealing. It just felt right. But I quickly figured out that would require formatting the data to be human readable every time I needed to display it as well as a bit of trickery on the front end to get the form input (which would be in a human readable format) into a basic int structure. That consumes a lot of my time, and possibly a lot of time for the users who eventually put the collected data to use. In exchange, I save a little bit of hard drive space.

The new server has 500 gigs of RAIDed space. A formatted telephone number string, such as “(888) 555 - 1234” takes up 16 characters. That's a 17 byte VARCHAR. Even less if we default to something shorter for unrequired fields left blank by the user. But for the sake of argument let’s go with VARCHAR. Storing “8885551234” as a BIGINT requires 8 bytes, saving us 9 bytes. That’s 9 out of over 500 billion available. We’ll end up with a few hundred form fields that will see a few hundred hits per year. For the sake of argument let’s say 400 squared, or 160,000. If my attempts at optimization save an average of 9 bytes per field per record, we'll run out of space after about 350,000 years. I'm not sure what the clock cycles are involved in fetching or even comparing a 16 character string vs a 10 digit number, but probably even more negligible than the storage space. Obviously, server resources are abundant when compared to my time and the time of my users.

I’m about half way done building the forms on my to-do list and I just convinced myself to change the way I handle things. Oy vey.

If data is collected for the purpose of being later presented to humans, I will store it as a string, optimization be damned. I’ll use numeric types for data that is collected to be crunched, which in all honesty if rare right now. In situations where it could conceivably be used for both, such as dates, I’m probably better off storing both versions and fetching (or sorting by) whichever is most appropriate rather than running a timestamp through the date() function as needed or converting user input into the MySQL DATE format (which is both human readable and easily sortable).

2 years into this redesign project and I’m still not done. In hindsight, the biggest setback has been my own perfectionism. I have a hand crafted attitude towards my work. I take great pride in it. But at what cost? It feels great when I see something like Smashing Magazine’s list of current best practices in form validation and I realize I’m already doing the majority of those things simply because they “feel right”. But I spent all day yesterday working on a single form, stayed 45 minutes late, and still didn’t get it done. That felt anything but great. What’s the trade off? Where do I draw the line?

I’m even doing it now. I’m encoding my apostrophes and quote marks. Can anyone out there notice the difference between “this” and "this"? It's 12 extra key strokes for me to use the "proper" encoded characters. For all I know, Blogger auto-converts them for me anyway. (*EDIT* No, it doesn’t.) I've just developed the habit over the years of hand coding HTML. 12 keystrokes per quote pairs times 5 quotes per page times 3,000 pages at 400 characters per minute is 7.5 hours. That's a full workday over the past 2 years. Is that too high a price to pay for typographic correctness?

What's the cost of XHTML validation? Of ADA compliance? That last one could end up saving us a mint if lawsuits start getting tossed around. I know where my personal comfort level lies on most of these issues and I'm willing to re-evaluate in light of new information and fresh perspectives. As the only web guy around here I guess I get to make those judgement calls for the institution. But in a freelance situation my time is the client's money, which is definitely a scarce resource. A 0.2% markup cost for things like typographic correctness may not sit well with some clients, but there's plenty of designers out there who also don't care. Maybe they can service those clients.

New York Post op ed says degrees aren't worth it

DON'T GET THAT COLLEGE DEGREE! INTELLECTUALLY AND FINANCIALLY, STUDIES SHOW IT'S NOT WORTH IT By JACK HOUGH

Not the most well reasoned or argued article I’ve ever read (I know it’s just the Post, but the blogs I read are typically better written than this) and I don’t agree with his prescribed fix, but he hits on 2 big issues I think are vital to the future of higher ed.

1. We're too slow.
2. We have no accountability.

We’re too slow.

Someone has to decide to go to college, then apply for admissions, then apply for financial aid (which may spoil the deal if not enough is available), then wait around for registration to open, then pray the classes they want/need get enough people to “make” but not enough people to fill up, then wait around for classes to start. It’s a lot of hoops for the students to jump through that have very little to do with the core value we offer them. Some of it is necessary, even beneficial, but the benefit isn't immediately apparent to the “end user”. I think in the next 10 years we'll be able to greatly streamline this process and make it much more student centered. If we don't, someone else will, and we may find ourselves obsolete.

Hough balances this with the abundance of cheap or even free quality educational resources available thanks to stuff like Open CourseWare and iTunes U. “Today's student who decides to learn at 1 a.m. should be doing it by 1:30. A process that makes him wait 18 months is not an education system. It's a barrier to education.” I don’t think it’s as bad as an 18 month wait, especially not here (we're a 2 year school were students can literally walk in the day before classes start and leave with a schedule for the coming semester, which I think is awesome), but I agree with the spirit of what he’s saying.

We have no accountability.

His focus is more on the ivy leagues, who seem to play a game of recruiting the brightest students who leave with a degree, still bright, but not much more so. Hough compares Harvard to a hospital who turns away the least healthy 92% of its patients and then takes credit for the health and longevity of the patients it treats. A degree is supposed to certify a graduate has met a certain standard of learning and competency, but everyone just has to take our word for it (“our” meaning the higher ed industry as a whole). Grade inflation and downright degree milling are eroding employers' faith in our authority to make such claims about our graduates.

He calls for government regulation enforced by standardized testing. I think that's horribly short sighted. But maybe we need something like the Bureau of Labor Statistics but for the long term impact of education. If longitudinal data was collected and made publically available in a standardized format, we’d have no choice but to get some accountability. Even with newspapers failing, there will always be someone out there willing to take us to task over statistics.

The hypothetical example Hough uses sets the groundwork for the type of data that could be collected. Median income 1 year after graduation, 5 years after, 10, 25, etc. Median education related debt at graduation with interest rates. We'd have to correct for outside influences such as social-economic status. Maybe comparing graduate incomes to the incomes of their own parents? Someone better at statistics than me could tackle that problem. Schools shouldn't be punished simply for servicing a poor area (although we all now they already are).

Other fuzzy areas would be attempt to collect data on productivity and employer satisfaction. Standardized testing could play a role in measuring things like value added. If there was a way to compare GRE scores to ACT/SAT scores, or maybe create a new test that's taken on the way in and on the way out to establish how much was actually learned. I think a large percentage of what is learned in a college or university experience would be hard to test for, so the results would have to be tampered with other data.

There's also the type of research that goes into works such as Colleges That Change Lives. That has very little to do with economic issues such as debt and income and much more to do with civic engagement and overall satisfaction with ones own life. Hough would probably disagree with me there, since colleges that change lives tend to spend a lot of time on “frivolous” but engaging topics like gender studies.

I also agree with Hough that we have an over reliance on the degree model. But Hough seems ready to completely abandon the degree model. I think it works quite well in some areas, but not as well in others. I think we're ready to see the rise of several different models, each suiting certain educational goals better than others. There will of course be a transitional period where square pegs are pounded into new round holes, but eventually each model will focus on its own strengths and attract students with the proper kind of attitudes and learning styles. I also think this will help us move away from viewing graduation as a culminating event and seek out models for life long learning.

That may be horribly idealistic of me, but I also realize this won't happen over night. My kids will probably be the square pegs being pounded into round holes. And by the time my grandkids are ready for college, there will be a fresh crop of issues to address. I expect evolution and improvement, not utopia.

.Edu websites and brand perception

I’ve been a member of a site called EduStyle since right after I took this job. It’s a gallery site for higher ed redesigns. I’ve been consistently blown away by the innovations, both visually and technologically, coming out of small, private colleges and universities compared to the standard 4-years.

In regards to technology, Douglas Adams said:

1. Everything that's already in the world when you're born is just normal;
2. anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3. anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

The modern web was “born” in 1993. We can go with the release of Mosaic and say April 22, in which case the web is now old enough to drive. Or we can move a little later in the year with the Eternal September in which case the web is still stuck with a learner’s permit. Either way, it’s old enough to be shopping around online and planning for its academic future. Our personified web will be a traditional starting freshman come Fall 2011.

A .edu website communicates a lot about the brand of the institution. If we're horribly behind the times in technology that our primary recruiting demographic considers part of the natural order of things, we will suffer for it. I’ve observed a gap developing over the past couple of years, and I admit that our site is on the wrong end of that gap. But I'm trying to catch up.

Compare Yale and Columbia to Denver Seminary and Biola Undergraduate Admissions. I’m picking on the Ivy League and perhaps a bit unfairly. Cornell’s design is good enough that it’s inspired many other redesigns, including our own. But it’s possible that the University of Southern California inspired Cornell.

The reason I single out the Ivy Leagues is because today’s potential students have an innate, subconscious ability to judge us based on our web presence even if they lack the prior knowledge to understand things like published research and accreditation. Does anyone go to the University of Phoenix because of the great research they produce? I highly doubt it. But their website feels more up to date than MIT. We can delude ourselves and pretend that somehow our students are too smart to fall for such marketing gimmicks. But it ain’t just gimmicks to them.

I think it’s easy for us to forget what it’s like to be a teenager shopping for a school. We’ve turned academics into a career, so we forget how alien a world it can be to an outsiders. And let’s be honest, the vast majority of our potential students are outsiders.

I’ve been at the top of my class throughout my entire academic career. I was recommended for West Point and was encouraged to apply to lots of prestigious schools. I didn’t pursue those options because I wanted to stay in Tennessee and I didn’t think I could afford Vandy. I don’t regret those decisions, but I admit I may have chosen differently had I been equipped with a better understanding of financial aid. I didn’t know who SACS was until my alma mater went through their own accreditation review while I was a student. I still don’t know the exact different between a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science. If I ever need to list my degrees, I’ve gotta go look that up. I didn’t know my degree from Pellisiippi was an Associates of Applied Science until I literally had the piece of paper in my hand. All I knew was that it was a degree that could advance my chosen career path. I had no reason to care about the academic nomenclature. I doubt today’s students are much different.

Managing and protecting our online brand perception is a big part of my job. As much as I loathe jargon, I can't really think of a better way to say it. I’m lucky to be working on a campus that understands that concept (if not in all the gory technical detail) in spite of the rarity of an administrator who was under 30 in 1993. :)