“Schools & Colleges” vs ”Academic Programs”

We are ever changing and refining the navigation for wayne.edu and over the past year of so many more universities have been changing their wording from “Schools & Colleges” to “Academic Programs”. That got us wondering, we thought academic programs had a more concise description of what is on the page behind the link. So we decided to try it out.

Technical Results

May 21 – June 15, 2009 (3 weeks)
126,433 Page Visitors
20,644 Conversions
16.33% Conversion Rate

Why was there no clear winner?

Two reason’s why I think no winner was found. The first is an issue on our end, we displayed the test for everyone, internal and external computers. Typically on campus staff/faculty have wayne.edu set as their homepage, they know the site and what they need to get to. Regardless what the link is called they will click it, this throws off the results since they are not our primary audience and they are not actually thinking about the click they are making.

The second is that someone looking for our list of programs has really only one route to get to it from wayne.edu and that is this link. It might take someone longer to figure out “Schools & Colleges” will give them a list of our programs but they still got there. They are adapting to our wording instead of ignoring our wording and using another method to find the information they need. I even wonder if we changed it to “What we offer” we would still get people clicking on it because they have a specific task in mind already.

We ended up just keeping Schools & Colleges for now

The thought is since there was no real winner although we love academic programs better we cannot justify the change. The university community has been voicestrous about any changes to wayne.edu and we want to make sure we have some real numbers to backup a navigation change.

Frankly the homepage navigation is not where we want it to be at all. It’s these types of tests that get us in the right direction on purpose instead of on a whim.

We are going to run another test on an unknown date for an unknown time with the lessons we learned from this test. Sorry we can’t tell you more but I am sure we will write about it afterward.

I gave the presentation as an overview of the importance of web standards and accessibility. Not only as the right thing to do but also how they can benefit any web project. Not only is there a cost savings to having and using standards but there is also a search engine benefit and overall your users will be happier.

Unfortunately the real world execution is not so cut and dry. Scope, time constraints and lack of communication effect the end result of both standards and accessibility. The key is communication, letting everyone know what the standards are and if there is an addition. Making standards and accessibility a habit and baking it into every piece of work you do will make it that much easier to execute on a consistent basis.

Presentation Video

Presentation Slides

Resources

• Opera Web Standards Curriculum
• The W3C Markup Validation Service
• Section 508: The Road to Accessibility
• jQuery: The Write Less, Do More JavaScript Library
• My DebugBar | IETester
• Cynthia Says – Accessibility Tester
• Web Development Tools – What’s in your web toolbelt?
• Understanding Web Accessibility Obstacles

Last but not least

!important is not your friend, please stop using it.

We are lucky in the fact that our hosting environment is setup to regularly respond to this amount of bandwidth. That is not to say we don’t have to optimize the site, far from the truth. The inherited version of the homepage weighed in at 400k total, 25k just for the HTML and over 40 http requests, it was a bad situation.

Recently we moved the homepage to the main server and rebuilt the site from scratch. Giving us ~120k total weight, 6k in HTML and just 15 http requests (including google analytics). Making this optimization didn’t happen over night, it took some time to get the numbers down this low, here is what we did.

1. Scrapped the original table based layout for CSS and XHTML.
   This took the site down by 70% right off the bat.

2. Optimized all images and combined where necessary.
   Removed ~10 http requests and saved 50% in file size.

3. Used Yahoo’s YSlow rules to have a goal to reach.
   We knew it was not possible to get an “A” grade since we do not have a CDN but we did our best in all other categories.
   

4. Combined and Minified all Javascript and CSS.
   Saved ~5 http requests and 40% in file size.

5. Configured far future expire tags and ETags.
   Making a second visitor with primed cache only need to grab ~50kb and 2-3 http request depending on the rotating panel.

Back end changes helped a lot on the server load also. A few things helped the processing time for each http request.

1. Removed all DB connections.
   All the dynamic data is updated via a cron with static html, this reduced the impact on the server per page load dramatically.

2. Reduced the number of PHP includes.
   Combined as many files as possible and used full paths for includes to reduce the number of files the server has to access per page load.

3. Took the homepage out of a php framework and wrote custom functions.
   Further reducing the overhead of the page load to just the essentials.

Overall we have had great response from the decreased load times and the standardization of the page. Response time during high traffic times like the start of classes and early registration have been kept so low it has eliminated any complaints we received in the past about slow page loading.

It took about 2 months to get everything in place and tested but it was well worth it. We have a standard compliant site now with very little impact on the server environment. Keeping it simple, flawless and eliminating any wasteful overhead definitely attributed to the projects success.