It was recently suggested that traffic to university web sites may be in
decline. In a post on Are University Web Sites in Decline?
<http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/are-university-web-sites-in-decline/>[1]
I have used a couple of tools in order to explore this suggestion across
a small sample. It does seem that traffic is declining slightly, but
fairly consistently, across Russell Group Universities. I am assuming
that this simply means that users are now making greater use of services
hosted in the cloud, rather than that they are no longer making use of
Web based services. However I'd be interested to hear if such trends
reflect organisational structures - do Web teams have responsibility for
management of content hosted outside the institution or is this the
responsibility of other groups?
I'd also be interested to hear if the usage trends I've described (which
make use of Google tools) reflect in-house usage statistics - clearly
the Google tools will not address trends to Intranet resources, but what
about Google Analytics findings for public pages?
Thanks
Brian
Reference
[1] Are University Websites in Decline?,
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/are-university-web-sites-in-decline/
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Brian Kelly
UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, UK, BA2 7AY
Email: [log in to unmask]
Blog: http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/briankelly
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