North American Colleges Spent a Mean of Nearly $28,000 on Website Development Consulting Fees in the 2006-07 Academic Year

New York, NY (PRWEB) November 12, 2007

North American colleges spent a mean of nearly $28,000 on website development consulting fees in the 2006-07 academic year, according to The Survey of College Website Management Practices, just published by Primary Research Group. The 171-page study presents more than 500 tables of data about college websites, and is based on data from 68 North American colleges.

Just a few of the study's hundreds of findings are that:

29.41 percent of the colleges in the sample had a policy in place to communicate in a crisis with students, faculty and staff through text messaging to cell phones.

About 22 percent of the webmasters in the survey use Apple/Mac as a main supplier of personal computers or workstations.

Lumnis was the most commonly used type of portal software, used by 47.83 percent of those that reported use of a portal software.

45.6 percent of the colleges in the sample allow postings for faculty and staff blogs.

The webmaster was the main training provider for 48.39 percent of web staffs reporting, while others on the web staff were the main trainers for 32.56 percent of survey participants. For 19.35 percent of those surveyed, another unit of the college handled training.

Thirty seven percent of public college webmasters review departmental or division sites every 1-2 years.

Significantly less than half of the colleges in the sample, 43.75 percent, required all college websites to conform to a single graphic style.

68.52 percent of the colleges in the sample used a content management system for departmental web pages.

The mean number of students employed by the college web staff was only 0.99 and the mean was only 0.50, and no college employed more than six students on the web staff.

Most college had at least one website editor, and the mean number per college was 1.05.

Close to 45 percent of respondents said that the most important person for initiating major website changes was a college official in the public affairs/university marketing department (or similar such department such as External Relations).

Only about 16 percent of colleges allowed deans to change the website without prior clearance.

PHD-level/research universities vastly outspent others, averaging almost $263,000 in salary spending for the web staff.

More than 13% of the web staffs in the sample receive primary or ancillary finding from specific campus services or functional units, such as The Department of Public Relations, in addition to or rather than directly from the college administration.

More than 58 percent of the colleges in the sample had a centralized web governance structure. Private colleges were much more likely than public colleges to have a centralized structure, by which we mean a structure that concentrates decision-making power in a centralized locus rather than dispersing it among several webmasters or authority centers.

The 68-college sample has nine community colleges, 41 BA/MA level colleges, and eighteen PHD-level or research universities. Mean enrollment FTE for the public colleges in the sample was 13,419; for the private colleges, 4,103.

The report is available from Primary Research Group for $249.00. A table of contents is attached to this press release. For more information contact Primary Research Group at 212-736-2316 or view our website at http://www.primaryresearch.com.

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