Liverpool’s Newest University Hopes to Impress In vain!

Posted by Hersh Bhardwaj in Website Reviews | 17 comments

Liverpool Hope University

I have an unbreakable bond with Liverpool Hope University in Liverpool. I studied for me my PG in Literary Criticism at Hope!!  Well, this review has nothing to do with my MA, but, as I recently stumbled upon the website I knew I have to contribute my tuppence.

Hope's Website

As an educational institution during recruitment season, Liverpool Hope’s target audience are prospective students. It’s not easy to segment all ‘prospective students’ in one group. There are many categories-

• Straight out of school for Undergrads,
• Some university experience looking for a PG course (like me!),
• Mature students with work experience,
• International students, both for PG and UG courses,

Without going in any details, it’s obvious that all the above student groups need relevant information and have different expectations from the University. Most important criteria for most students would be course availability and acceptance. No doubt most students would also want to know how the social life in the city and the university is. International students would want to know about costs.

Student preferences

Mature students would want to know about course usefuless and of course the costs involved. The above graphic should make a blueprint in terms of what info should be reflected on the homepage. Lets ask a few questions keeping in mind the above and Liverpool Hope’s homepage:-

• Does the site appeal to A-level passouts looking for first Uni experience?
• Does the site present professional info about Uni’s industry credentials?
• Does it reflect on WHY an international student should come here?
• Does the site cash-in on the fact that its based in Liverpool ( capital of culture 2008)?
• Is it slick, stylish, professional, thought-provoking, inviting, or, informative?

I had a little look at some of the educational sites. Yale.edu takes you on a slideshow tour of the life at Yale. The tour smartly answers a lot of subconscious queries of prospective students from all groups.On the other hand, Edge Hill University, which is one of Liverpool Hope’s competitor from north-west England, caters to young and slick audience. The home page has a personality and presents that confidently to visiting students.

Liverpool Hope lacks both of these approaches; neither does it present an informative slide-show option which answers questions from most prospective students, nor does it target a single student-group confidently. Apart from these issues, I couldn’t help noticing these problems:-

• The favicon still shows Joomla cms’s icon.( Joomla is a cms which Hope’s site uses to manage content,  but they haven’t bothered to get a customised favicon designed)
• Site is not a valid HTML or CSS document. A cardial sin for a university website!!
• Accessibility statement says, ‘If we can make our Web site more accessible to you, or you have any comments regarding our website please e-mail us at..’ There is no email address on that page, and they expect visitors to request accessibility features. Very proactive!!
• Basic branding debacle: logo on the home page is different from rest of the site. None of the logos are examples of creative genius anyway. The placement on the home page banner is amateur.
• The overall site coloring is boring to say the least with very little use of multi-media use.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that an alien coming from Mars would date the site to early 2000 on the basis of its look, style, branding and, absence of web 2.0 elements.