Comparative Website Analysis

USCA School of Education vs Shepard University School of Education

Dear School of Education department chair at Shepard University, thank you for allowing me to speak with you and address my concerns with your school website. While I was looking on your website and comparing it to another schools website that I am also interested in attending, I saw a few areas that could use some improvement that can be made that would then make Shepard University my top choice.

Compare: I like both of these websites. For the most part, both of these websites are set up very similar with a few things that are different between the two making them each unique in their own ways. Both of the website contain the most important information, which is the location and the contact information. Both USCA and Shepard University have their contact information located at the bottom of the website which is exactly where I would think to look for that information. Both of these websites also have a picture on their homepage. On Shepard University’s homepage, they have a picture of their campus. On USCA’s homepage, they used pictures of actual students in their element, in a classroom.

Dislike: Shepard University’s website it quite boring. Granite the colors of the website might be blue and yellow, the information and the font on the website is quite boring. The size of the font on the website is also quite small, but they do at least have some bolded words for the information that they want to stand out the most.

Primary Audience: It looks like to me, the primary audience for both of these websites are the incoming students that they would like to have come to their school. USCA looks like they are attracting the younger audience while Shepard University looks like they are trying to attract the older, more mature audience.

Footer Links: At the bottoms of both pages, like already mentioned, there are active links. At the bottom of the Shepard University website, there are links to their facebook, twitter, indeed, instagram. and flicker. These icons are very small and not very appealing to the eye of incoming students. The print for the layout of the contact information and address are also very small and hard to read. For USCA, there are also links to the same social media sites, but the icons are a lot more colorful and bright. These icons were a lot more appealing to the human eye, and in fact brought a lot of attention to me first. The layout of the footer is a lot more organized for USCA in general and the links are a whole lot more clear.

What information is being provided? – On the University of South Carolina- Aiken website, there are a lot more colors and even pictures. The colors are a lot more bright, and the text is in more than one color. To display each section of information, they have rectangles with headlines inside of them. These rectangles are also active links that allow the students to read more into depth if they are interesting. There is a lot of different information available on the homepage of the Elementary Education website. 1) Programs of Study 2) Degree Requirements 3)Praxis Information 4) Professional Program 5) Internship Information 6) Scholarship Information 7) Call me Mister 8) Advising 9) Forms. Each one of these links are located on the right side of the website as active links for anyone to clock on and read about. Under those links are important dates and headlines that the students in the SOE should know about.

On the Shepard University website, there is overall a lot less information available. The only links that there are are the undergraduate programs links, and the graduate program links along with the social media links. At the top of the page, there is an “about” section that tells us a little bit about their program and their awards. Then there is a description about the Program Goals with bold letters, then the Contact information for each dean and or coordinator of each program.

Strange Findings: One thing that I found quite interesting was that on the bottom of the Shepard University’s page, there is a title that says “Donor Information”. Under this title, there is an option for anyone to make a donation to the school. This was very neat to me because all of the information is available for you, making the process of donating money easy for anyone to do. It allows you to pick one of the dollar amounts: $25, $50, $75, or other, and then under that section there is the credit card information that you can fill out.

Overall: As a conclusion, I believe that the University of South Carolina- Aiken’s website is a lot more appealing than Shepard University’s website. In order for Shepard University to compete, they need to bring in a lot more pictures along with more color to their website to make it look a little less boring. They also need to bring the text to a bigger size because it is quite hard to read it if you don’t have the best eye site. Making sure that the website is readable to all audiences is very important, and having a website that pops is also a huge advantage when people are trying to decide where to get their degree.