College Web Development

Believe it or not as a web developer you are a marketer, if you are not already you need to learn to be a marketing expert. You are selling the product of an education. If you are not yet convinced here is a demonstration: ‘The first step in your customers product search is visiting the products website and requesting information.’ That is a standard sentence in the business world, so how does it apply to college education? Watch as I replace the word customer with prospective student and product with college. ‘The first step in your prospective students college search is visiting the colleges website and requesting information.’ So, not all of you are completely convinced, that is ok, this post on information request form optimization will demonstrate how important it is to treat your website as a product selling tool.

Lets start off with a view of the most common misstates. Infomration request forms are known as Lead Generation in the internet marketing world. What does ths mean for you, well your information request form is a lead generation form. Therefor it falls into the same best practices category, i.e, “On a lead generation site, optimize form questions, try to shorten the time needed to fill out the form, and introduce ways for the visitor to take more control of when and how they’re contacted.” - Bryan Eisenberg

Common Mistakes,

Asking too many questions. This is a big one, lets take a look at some of the worst offenders to this rule.

1. Lewis-Clark State College - The form is almost 4 pages long !!!!!
2. Berkeley College - The form is long and it is also very confusing, the prospective student is supposed to create an account and then have a web page to request information… I don’t even know what is going on.
3. Dixie State College - Take a look for yourself, the form is almost as long as Lewis-Clark but does not look nearly as nice

So your school is not on the list of worst offenders, great! What can you do to improve your lead generation.

Take a look at a couple minor offenders:

1. Brooklyn College - So their form is shorter, not nearly as short as it can be. But the worst part is they ask the student to leave the site to get the college board code for their high school. Having someone leave the site is a guaranteed way to lose leads.
2. Gettysburg College - Not terrible, but they ask for clearly useless information, i.e. Nickname, and other information that might be useful but most likely not worth asking, i.e. Race, Gender, Sex.

Now, I was not able to find many great examples of information request in my quick searching but here is one example that is nearly ideal.

1. Southern Utah University - The form is as short as possible assuming they utilize every piece of information asked for. It is also clean and quick to fill out, no confirm e-mail or any repeated information. They should probably conduct an optimization test to see the effect of adding ‘preferred form of contact’ radio buttons.

Remember, the more applications you receive the better your school looks. Even if they are from students who do not meet your entrance requirements. Low acceptance rate ( applications relative to acceptance) is a major influence in college reviews such as the College Board or The Princeton Review.

Final point: Each additional field in a form reduces the number of people who will fill it out. So, if your boss says he wants such and such information, be absolutely positivity the information is used. And weight the loss in leads to the benefit of targeted mailings.