Varsity websites wanting

A fortnight ago, the Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology (MMUST) website informed you that upcoming events included the 84th edition of the Schools and Colleges National Music Festival. The event was held months ago.

In the same website, the latest news item was tagged as Mr Robert K. Wanyama Egesa. When you clicked on it, you found his CV.

Last week they added three more CVs as news.

Welcome to the some-times-cob-webbed Kenyan university website .

We are still at MMUST, remember. If you don’t mind high blood pressure, click on ‘publications’ and it informs you “The site is temporarily unavailable. Please notify the System Administrator.” But did they leave the system administrator’s contacts? You guessed right, they did not.

No need to say that MMUST online shop has been under maintenance since it was created.

If you have anything else you need to know, www.mmust.ac.ke asks you “If you have any inquiries to make please feel free to fill in the form bellow and submit.”

A visit to Multimedia University is greeted by a series of grammatical mistakes. Sample this: MMU in collaboration with Koreal Republic. Then there is a news item whose intro reads: “The Dean of FAMECO have strongly warned ….”

And, it would appear that universities are allergic to website updates.

When we were researching for this story a fortnight ago, The University of Nairobi (ranked 16 in Africa by Webometrics) had posted the latest news item on July 2. But this is better that the upcoming event at St Paul’s University which will happen on April 30, 2010.

Anyway, they score way better than Kiriri Women’s University which is still inviting applications for the 2009 May intake.

Having outdated university websites cant be healthy especially when the design is an eyesore and loading speeds chameleonish.

If you happen to be looking for one small piece of information (which you most probably are), it could take you hours on end of waiting, clicking, more waiting, … until you’re finally answered with a Server-not-found message.

Moi University is one of the many cyber offenders that use horrific shapes and fonts, a mockery of creativity. On the Inoorero website, the fonts are too small for comfortable reading.

Universities are supposed to generate content, but how much of this content is posted online? The University of Nairobi and Kenyatta University have overwhelming information on-line. Maseno University in its online publications section has posted only 12 journals, two books and 12 filtered publications.

So, what is it all these university websites do not quite understand? MMUST webmaster, Samuel Wetungu, says that creating a website for a university is a tedious and demanding task.

“A university website is a corporate entity. You have to consider the university’s identity, culture, colour and operations,” Mr Wetungu says. One of the ways, he has used to improve the website, which is still in a deplorable state, is acting on the feedback from visitors.

In one of a survey, visitors are asked, “Are you registered on MMUST Website to access privileged information?” Those who do not know constitute 45 per cent vote and 28.9 per cent is shared by those who say no and yes. “I will never register” is 6.3 per cent and “I registered but deregistered later” 3.2 per cent.

Most world-class university websites have moved away from presenting two unhelpful but common features on a Kenyan university’s home pages, specifically: the statement of philosophy and the letter from the Vice Chancellor.

Having those up there might seem like a good idea to the management, but they fall short of irritating the website’s most important visitor: the prospective student.

“Prospective students are more interested in information about financial aid, how they will adapt to the campus life, collaboration of the university with other institutions, how their course will help them in the job market and a map around the university than administrative rhetoric,” says Dennis Munyaka , a fellow with the University Students Fraternity Think Tank(UFTT).

Erick Kathenya, the Strathmore University Communications Officer says, “a university website is a tool for finding answers. All the departments and students assist in this cause.”

And Strathmore seems to have got it right. A visitor needs to scroll over one of the boxes to get what he wants easily.

So what accounts for the apparent disconnect between what some universities choose to include on their home pages and what visitors actually want to find there?

“For one thing, it’s not easy to establish what users want because it requires extensive research and management calls for a clear and easy communication channel by various departments,” Mr Wetungu says.

But even then, some university’ home pages are saturated with features that do not so much reflect what visitors need, but what various departments and schools want. The lobbying for prime positions has a lot of influence on what the site should look like.

The result is an unappealingly busy website jam-packed with a million links for the wrong reasons. www.uon.ac.ke has a lot of information packed in a way that confuses the reader. Most of the university webmasters are struggling to put “everything online.”

The problem is that the senior managers who drive this strategy often lack a genuine understanding of what the website is useful for.

“They don’t know what should be there and what should not,” says Munyaka. Some of the best websites include Strathmore’s, KU’s and Jomo and JKUAT’s.

Luis Borrallo, Strathmore’s Director of Advancement, says before they fine-tuned their website “It was like the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. Everybody knew that a lot was happening at the University but no one could say exactly what it was.”