Social Work Schools Site Evaluation

There are a total of 840 social work schools in the US. While all of these schools have websites, 785 social work 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 95% are on Facebook.

Visual Preferences

Color

Approximately 66.9% of the 840 social work schools use white as the primary color on their websites. Another 11.4% use grey as the primary color on their websites. Blue (6.2%), yellow (5%) and black (4%) are other colors commonly used as the primary color on social work school websites.

The colors used on the websites of the largest social work 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 42.7%, of social work school websites use Arial as the primary font on their websites. Other fonts commonly used on social work school websites include Verdana (26.1%) and Helvetica (6.9%).

The largest social work 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 575 social work schools have YouTube channels. These schools each have an average of 153 YouTube channel subscribers. The social work schools with the greatest number of YouTube channel subscribers are:

1. University of Minnesota - Duluth: 4,518 subscribers
2. Columbia University in the City of New York: 4,146 subscribers
3. Vanderbilt University: 2,612 subscribers

Exactly 658 social work schools have Twitter accounts. These schools each have an average of 1,673 Twitter account followers. The social work schools with the greatest number of Twitter followers are:

1. Arizona State University: 24,295 followers
2. Ohio State University - Main Campus: 18,232 followers
3. Auburn University: 17,795 followers

Web Metrics

Although all social work schools have websites, only about 19% of these schools actually appear to regularly maintain their sites. This can be deduced from the fact that 81.6% of social work school websites have 3 or more broken links one click away from their homepage. The social work 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. Harrisburg Area Community College - Harrisburg: 4,597 broken links

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

1. University of Connecticut: 0 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors
2. Florida State University: 0 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors
3. Warner University: 0 HTML validation errors; 0 CSS validation errors

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

1. Alabama A & M University: 63 HTML validation errors; 905 CSS validation errors
2. Sacred Heart University: 556 HTML validation errors; 65 CSS validation errors
3. Winthrop University: 365 HTML validation errors; 99 CSS validation errors