Psychology Schools Site Evaluation

There are a total of 1,648 psychology schools in the US. While all of these schools have websites, 1,499 psychology 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 63.7% of the 1,648 psychology schools use white as the primary color on their websites. Another 13.7% use grey as the primary color on their websites. Blue (6.1%), yellow (5.6%) and black (5.2%) are other colors commonly used as the primary color on psychology school websites.

The colors used on the websites of the largest psychology 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 44.3%, of psychology school websites use Arial as the primary font on their websites. Other fonts commonly used on psychology school websites include Verdana (21.7%) and Helvetica (8.3%).

The largest psychology 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 1,124 psychology schools have YouTube channels. These schools each have an average of 209 YouTube channel subscribers. The psychology schools with the greatest number of YouTube channel subscribers are:

1. Harvard University: 28,331 subscribers
2. Yale University: 20,055 subscribers
3. Carnegie Mellon University: 16,128 subscribers

Exactly 1,292 psychology schools have Twitter accounts. These schools each have an average of 1,649 Twitter account followers. The psychology schools with the greatest number of Twitter followers are:

1. Harvard University: 69,704 followers
2. Indiana University - Bloomington: 27,945 followers
3. University of Phoenix - Online Campus: 26,204 followers

Web Metrics

Although all psychology schools have websites, only about 20% of these schools actually appear to regularly maintain their sites. This can be deduced from the fact that 80.3% of psychology school websites have 3 or more broken links one click away from their homepage. The psychology schools with the most number of broken links are:

1. College of Saint Mary: 23,650 broken links
2. Creighton University: 7,788 broken links
3. Lasell College: 6,728 broken links

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

1. Arizona Christian University: 0 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors
2. California Lutheran University: 0 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors
3. California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo: 0 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors

The psychology 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. Alabama A & M University: 63 HTML validation errors; 905 CSS validation errors
3. Irvine Valley College: 0 HTML validation errors; 854 CSS validation errors