Hospitality Schools Site Evaluation

There are a total of 514 hospitality schools in the US. While all of these schools have websites, 447 hospitality 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 96% are on Facebook.

Visual Preferences

Color

Approximately 70.2% of the 514 hospitality schools use white as the primary color on their websites. Another 9.7% use grey as the primary color on their websites. Black (5.1%), blue (4.9%) and yellow (4.1%) are other colors commonly used as the primary color on hospitality school websites.

The colors used on the websites of the largest hospitality 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 41.2%, of hospitality school websites use Arial as the primary font on their websites. Other fonts commonly used on hospitality school websites include Verdana (24.1%) and Tahoma (8.8%).

The largest hospitality 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 296 hospitality schools have YouTube channels. These schools each have an average of 181 YouTube channel subscribers. The hospitality schools with the greatest number of YouTube channel subscribers are:

1. Culinary Institute of America: 8,384 subscribers
2. University of Phoenix - Online Campus: 2,942 subscribers
3. Purdue University - Main Campus: 2,760 subscribers

Exactly 354 hospitality schools have Twitter accounts. These schools each have an average of 1,506 Twitter account followers. The hospitality schools with the greatest number of Twitter followers are:

1. University of Phoenix - Online Campus: 26,204 followers
2. Arizona State University: 24,295 followers
3. Texas A & M University - College Station: 19,518 followers

Web Metrics

Although all hospitality schools have websites, only about 25% of these schools actually appear to regularly maintain their sites. This can be deduced from the fact that 75.1% of hospitality school websites have 3 or more broken links one click away from their homepage. The hospitality schools with the most number of broken links are:

1. Tarrant County College District: 14,140 broken links
2. Lasell College: 6,728 broken links
3. Harrisburg Area Community College - Harrisburg: 4,597 broken links

It is also interesting to evaluate the number of HTML and CSS validation errors on hospitality school websites to get a sense of the quality of these sites. The hospitality 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. California Culinary Academy: 0 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors
3. Foothill College: 0 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors

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

1. Chippewa Valley Technical College: 121 HTML validation errors; 942 CSS validation errors
2. Bergen Community College: 178 HTML validation errors; 869 CSS validation errors
3. Lake - Sumter Community College: 62 HTML validation errors; 864 CSS validation errors