Nursing Schools Site Evaluation

There are a total of 2,391 nursing schools in the US. While all of these schools have websites, 1,843 nursing 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 94% are on Facebook.

Visual Preferences

Color

Approximately 67.3% of the 2,391 nursing schools use white as the primary color on their websites. Another 12% use grey as the primary color on their websites. Blue (6.2%), yellow (4.9%) and black (4.3%) are other colors commonly used as the primary color on nursing school websites.

The colors used on the websites of the largest nursing 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 40.7%, of nursing school websites use Arial as the primary font on their websites. Other fonts commonly used on nursing school websites include Verdana (25.6%) and Tahoma (6.4%).

The largest nursing 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 1,120 nursing schools have YouTube channels. These schools each have an average of 127 YouTube channel subscribers. The nursing schools with the greatest number of YouTube channel subscribers are:

1. Yale University: 20,055 subscribers
2. Columbia University in the City of New York: 4,146 subscribers
3. Mayo School of Health Sciences: 3,951 subscribers

Exactly 1,334 nursing schools have Twitter accounts. These schools each have an average of 1,065 Twitter account followers. The nursing 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. Yale University: 23,748 followers

Web Metrics

Although all nursing schools have websites, only about 29% of these schools actually appear to regularly maintain their sites. This can be deduced from the fact that 71.5% of nursing school websites have 3 or more broken links one click away from their homepage. The nursing 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. College of Saint Mary: 23,650 broken links

It is also interesting to evaluate the number of HTML and CSS validation errors on nursing school websites to get a sense of the quality of these sites. The nursing 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. Gavilan College: 0 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors

The nursing 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. Spoon River College: 68 HTML validation errors; 871 CSS validation errors