Mechanical Engineering Schools Site Evaluation

There are a total of 562 mechanical engineering schools in the US. While all of these schools have websites, 531 mechanical engineering 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 97% are on Facebook.

Visual Preferences

Color

Approximately 66% of the 562 mechanical engineering schools use white as the primary color on their websites. Another 11.7% use grey as the primary color on their websites. Blue (7.3%), yellow (4.8%) and black (4.6%) are other colors commonly used as the primary color on mechanical engineering school websites.

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

1. Arizona State University: grey 34% and white 4.5%
2. Ohio State University - Main Campus: white 30% and grey 3.4%
3. University of Central Florida: white 46% and black 1.6%

Font

The largest number, nearly 43.1%, of mechanical engineering school websites use Arial as the primary font on their websites. Other fonts commonly used on mechanical engineering school websites include Verdana (25.1%) and Helvetica (6.9%).

The largest mechanical engineering school's websites use the following fonts:

1. Arizona State University: Arial
2. Ohio State University - Main Campus: Helvetica
3. University of Central Florida: Arial

Social Presence

Exactly 381 mechanical engineering schools have YouTube channels. These schools each have an average of 654 YouTube channel subscribers. The mechanical engineering schools with the greatest number of YouTube channel subscribers are:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 113,180 subscribers
2. Yale University: 20,055 subscribers
3. Carnegie Mellon University: 16,128 subscribers

Exactly 451 mechanical engineering schools have Twitter accounts. These schools each have an average of 2,368 Twitter account followers. The mechanical engineering schools with the greatest number of Twitter followers are:

1. Arizona State University: 24,295 followers
2. Yale University: 23,748 followers
3. Texas A & M University - College Station: 19,518 followers

Web Metrics

Although all mechanical engineering schools have websites, only about 19% of these schools actually appear to regularly maintain their sites. This can be deduced from the fact that 81.7% of mechanical engineering school websites have 3 or more broken links one click away from their homepage. The mechanical engineering schools with the most number of broken links are:

1. Blue Ridge Community College: 6,741 broken links
2. University of Michigan - Dearborn: 5,490 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 mechanical engineering school websites to get a sense of the quality of these sites. The mechanical engineering school websites with the cleanest websites, i.e., least number of HTML and CSS validation errors are:

1. California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo: 0 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors
2. University of Connecticut: 0 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors
3. Rensselaer Hartford Graduate Center Inc: 0 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors

The mechanical engineering 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. Alabama A & M University: 63 HTML validation errors; 905 CSS validation errors
3. University of Colorado Denver: 0 HTML validation errors; 794 CSS validation errors