Accounting Schools Site Evaluation

There are a total of 2,363 accounting schools in the US. While all of these schools have websites, 1,884 accounting schools have some social media presence, having accounts on at least one of the three major social media outlets, Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. Of the schools that have a social media presence, the greatest number, almost 95% are on Facebook.

Visual Preferences

Color

Approximately 66.4% of the 2,363 accounting schools use white as the primary color on their websites. Another 13.4% use grey as the primary color on their websites. Blue (5.8%), yellow (4.8%) and black (4.7%) are other colors commonly used as the primary color on accounting school websites.

The colors used on the websites of the largest accounting schools in the nation, are as follows:

1. University of Phoenix - Online Campus: grey 49%
2. Kaplan University - Davenport Campus: white 56% and blue 1.1%
3. Arizona State University: grey 34% and white 4.5%

Font

The largest number, nearly 44.4%, of accounting school websites use Arial as the primary font on their websites. Other fonts commonly used on accounting school websites include Verdana (23.9%) and Helvetica (6.8%).

The largest accounting school's websites use the following fonts:

1. University of Phoenix - Online Campus: Arial
2. Kaplan University - Davenport Campus: Times New Roman
3. Arizona State University: Arial

Social Presence

Exactly 1,251 accounting schools have YouTube channels. These schools each have an average of 131 YouTube channel subscribers. The accounting schools with the greatest number of YouTube channel subscribers are:

1. Carnegie Mellon University: 16,128 subscribers
2. University of Minnesota - Duluth: 4,518 subscribers
3. Maharishi University of Management: 3,385 subscribers

Exactly 1,478 accounting schools have Twitter accounts. These schools each have an average of 1,244 Twitter account followers. The accounting schools with the greatest number of Twitter followers are:

1. Indiana University - Bloomington: 27,945 followers
2. University of Phoenix - Online Campus: 26,204 followers
3. Arizona State University: 24,295 followers

Web Metrics

Although all accounting schools have websites, only about 26% of these schools actually appear to regularly maintain their sites. This can be deduced from the fact that 74.5% of accounting school websites have 3 or more broken links one click away from their homepage. The accounting schools with the most number of broken links are:

1. Central Arizona College: 93,584 broken links
2. Minnesota West Community and Technical College: 26,086 broken links
3. Tarrant County College District: 14,140 broken links

It is also interesting to evaluate the number of HTML and CSS validation errors on accounting school websites to get a sense of the quality of these sites. The accounting school websites with the cleanest websites, i.e., least number of HTML and CSS validation errors are:

1. Pima Community College: 0 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors
2. Cossatot Community College of the University of Arkansas: 0 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors
3. California Lutheran University: 0 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors

The accounting school websites with the greatest number of HTML and CSS validation errors include:

1. University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point: 0 HTML validation errors; 1,213 CSS validation errors
2. Chippewa Valley Technical College: 121 HTML validation errors; 942 CSS validation errors
3. Bergen Community College: 178 HTML validation errors; 869 CSS validation errors