Prospective college students might not browse a school’s website exclusively on their smart phones, but that’s often where the browsing starts, making the site’s mobile friendliness paramount in higher education’s tug-of-war for new students.
Responsive web design (RWD) has proven a hot topic in educational technology circles over the past few years, and a study conducted by Google, “The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior,” offers good news for colleges that have invested in RWD, which makes a school’s site readable on an enormous desktop screen or a shrunken smart-phone display.
Nine in 10 respondents to Google’s survey-based research said they moved from one screen to another to accomplish a goal—from smart phones to PCs, for example, or tablet computers to PCs.
The prominence of what Google termed “sequential screening”—going from one screen to another to view a school admissions site, say—grabbed campus technology leaders’ attention this month as the best reason yet for schools to prioritize RWD as a way of attracting prospective students.
“What the Google study shows is that the admissions game is probably not moving exclusively to mobile, but that your mobile site is becoming the first thing prospective students look at,” Karine Joly, a web marketing professional and founder of collegewebeditor.com, a site at the forefront of the RWD movement, said in a blog post. “People move to different devices because they want to accomplish different things, and they prefer to use the device that better fits the specific need they’re trying to fulfill at a given moment.”
- Research: Social media has negative impact on academic performance - April 2, 2020
- Number 1: Social media has negative impact on academic performance - December 31, 2014
- 6 reasons campus networks must change - September 30, 2014