Pastry Schools Site Evaluation

There are a total of 138 pastry schools in the US. While all of these schools have websites, 86 pastry 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 91% are on Facebook.

Visual Preferences

Color

Approximately 64.5% of the 138 pastry schools use white as the primary color on their websites. Another 15.2% use grey as the primary color on their websites. Black (10.1%), green (5.1%) and yellow (2.9%) are other colors commonly used as the primary color on pastry school websites.

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

1. Houston Community College: white 36% and grey 4.3%
2. Valencia Community College: white 25% and grey 5.3%
3. Columbus State Community College: white 32% and grey 4%

Font

The largest number, nearly 59.4%, of pastry school websites use Arial as the primary font on their websites. Other fonts commonly used on pastry school websites include Verdana (23.2%) and Tahoma (5.1%).

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

1. Houston Community College: Arial
2. Valencia Community College: Times New Roman
3. Columbus State Community College: Arial

Social Presence

Exactly 46 pastry schools have YouTube channels. These schools each have an average of 310 YouTube channel subscribers. The pastry schools with the greatest number of YouTube channel subscribers are:

1. Culinary Institute of America: 8,384 subscribers
2. The Art Institute of Atlanta: 1,885 subscribers
3. Grand Rapids Community College: 1,166 subscribers

Exactly 61 pastry schools have Twitter accounts. These schools each have an average of 992 Twitter account followers. The pastry schools with the greatest number of Twitter followers are:

1. Culinary Institute of America: 10,091 followers
2. The Art Institute of Atlanta: 9,023 followers
3. French Culinary Institute: 7,384 followers

Web Metrics

Although all pastry schools have websites, only about 31% of these schools actually appear to regularly maintain their sites. This can be deduced from the fact that 69.9% of pastry school websites have 3 or more broken links one click away from their homepage. The pastry schools with the most number of broken links are:

1. Harrisburg Area Community College - Harrisburg: 4,597 broken links
2. Schoolcraft College: 1,322 broken links
3. Bellingham Technical College: 365 broken links

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

1. California Culinary Academy: 0 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors
2. Gwinnett Technical College: 0 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors
3. Baltimore International College: 0 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors

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

1. Milwaukee Area Technical College: 519 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors
2. Bellingham Technical College: 284 HTML validation errors; 47 CSS validation errors
3. Elgin Community College: 42 HTML validation errors; 273 CSS validation errors