How to make Coventry university website better?

CU Home and CU Online

Taking a cursory look through the Coventry University website, one sees a good brand well put together. But that is not enough in marketing the school because quality demands the website to be detailed, relevant, personalized, easy to find, timely, clear, accurate and up to date.

Search Engine Optimisation

Gone are the days when the world will find its way to your doorstep if you had a better mousetrap. These are the days of information proliferation in which the customers are continuously bombarded with loads of options on the internet and every brand, including Coventry University (CU), has to devise bett

er marketing mechanics to make it easier for customers to find their way to the virtual doorstep of the brand, that is, the website. In the process of preparing this piece, an experiment was carried out to check how CU has utilised the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to market its website. The result was a negative surprise. On Google,

arguably the world’s most popular search engine, the CU website did not appear until the tenth page when the key phrase ‘UK university’ was typed in the search bar. This shows many potential customers reluctant to click until the tenth page might not find out the CU website using this important key phrase. However there are ways to improve the university’s visibility on web and making it rank among the first page competitors. One of such ways is to increase its use of branded community-based websites (social networks, e-communities and blogs) which will drive more traffic to the CU website thereby p

ushing it up the SEO ladder. Another approach is to devote more budget to search engine marketing. In this case, SEO firms will be paid for both advice and optimization work to make the website rank higher.

Apart from SEO technique, there are other aspects of CU online we need to put into consideration. All the useful contents (texts) such as ‘Modules Information,’ ‘IT Help’ are put in the middle. Firstly, it appears that 24 hours online representative for student request. 24/7 online help desk failed to meet. For example, when technical problem occurs, it is not likely to connect the chat line to find the solution. It just appeared that the line is busy. It means the university has not met their promise. Furthermore, the university has tried to display as much as useful information in the front page. However, those features have not been well deployed. Too much texts make the website become unprofessional. It looks funny, clunky and the word” CU Portal” in the banner seem to be out of the box. As a result, it might fail to convey that the website is trustworthy. Again, putting more useful texts and individual tag in the front page are good for students to access to information, however, it would better if there is Search Engine Customization bots to every step of the way to help students to navigate the page.

The home page of the Coventry University website shows the courses offered by the university, for example postgraduate courses, after selecting advertising, detailed information is not given, what is shown is the course name and code plus duration of study. Then one has to take more time searching for the details, so information is not easy to find.

When a course is selected, there should be detailed information, for example cost of studying.

CU online help page, where one has to write a question or comment is not clearly shown. The aspect of finding information easily is not there. One has to scroll through many questions and comments to get where to write his/her question at the bottom of the page, this is time consuming. A page can be created just for asking questions and a different page with the questions and comments or it can be at the beginning of the help page then the comments follow.

Coventry University Online Store

Coventry University online store offers a range of products and services which are interesting and useful for undergraduate, postgraduate and alumni. The payment procedure is fast and doesn’t require too many details to complete the purchase. The receipt is sent after the purchase is completed to the customer’s e-mail address. However, there are no details about the service besides the price on the receipt.

For example, if it is a trip to another city it would be better to include the date and time of departure of the trip on the e-ticket because most of the trips are bought online several weeks before the trip and the customer might forget the time or date of the trip.

The range of products and services can be diversified with online store of used books for students where they can exchange books, buy or sell them for better prices and spend much less time for delivering.

The database of events can be improved to have more professional conferences and seminars for students in different faculties with more affordable prices.

Technology Park link doesn’t work. When the click is done on the link the error is being indicated and the page requested does not exist on the server. It is advisable easer to fix it or to remove in order to maintain professional image of the online store.

Does your website generate Trust?

( Source: Amazon.co.uk web page)

Trust and trustworthiness

Tullberg (2008) reviewed that two components of trust are trustfulness and trustworthiness; trustworthiness determines the increase or decrease of trust. Other researcher argued that trust is focused on an individual’s enthusiasm to entrust, to do something where the support of other people is important for results; trustworthiness is more likely related to the individual’s capability to interact with others and create the reliable information for the group as a whole ( Bolton, et 2008).

Most scholars in marketing research draw upon a belief-based conceptualization of trust that it is perceived from trustworthiness (Gefen 2003 cited in Buttner and Goritz 2008: 39). Researches prove the higher the perceived trustworthiness; the more likely visitors are to buy from the web-site. In addition an increase in perceived risk lowers the intention to buy, which is partially influenced by reducing the perceived trustworthiness of the web-site.

According to Wood (2006), an interesting viewpoint about trustworthiness is that the proponents of the neuro-linguitic programming (NLP), which is a human communication theory, suggests that building rapport is solely dependent on the communication process and not the content. In reality, this means that buyers (the receiver) from a football club’s website, for instance, will develop confidence and trust in the virtual store because of their perception of the owners of the website (the sender) and not necessarily due to what is said on the website (the content).

How to be trustworthy

According to Mayer (cited in Buttner and Goritz 2008:36) trust is a perceived trustworthiness. In order to gain trustworthiness three main functions have to be performed by a web-site:

- Ability to fulfil given promises
- To be interested in consumers well-being
- To follow a set of desirable principles.

To put differently other scholars were of the opinion that there are four determinants of a trustworthiness of a web-site: viz-a-vis usefulness, competence, integrity, reputation (Miller 2008). Our analysis of these determinants will be based on the use of Manchester United web-site layout:

· Usefulness
The website has a variety of high quality products to offer, however, it would be much better to have forums or product's comments for new visitors to know more about the information of the products.

· Competence
Since Miller (2008) admitted in his research that most users are likely to look for positive cues that signal a professionally designed website which tends to improve the sites trustworthiness. Thus, in case of this football club website, let’s look at the typography; there are some positive and negative cues. For example, the red colour is likely to appeal and arouse visitors’ positive emotions which influence his / her decision to spend more time on the site. However, the amount of words and texts seem to confuse the viewers.
· Integrity
In order to test the integrity for the trustworthiness, Beatty (2008) raised a question for the site: 'Does the website exhibit honesty, ethical behaviour?'. That means whether the site addresses information about security, privacy concerns and identity disclosure or not. In case of the Manchester website, the layout showed the VeriSign services and the security confirmation. It raises the level of customers’ trustworthiness. Another good aspect of Manchester United online store is that its merchandise is licensed and provides high level of customer care.

· Reputation
Manchester United is a well-known football club, the reputation is already established and the image of this club speaks for itself. That is why the website has strong credibility which is enhanced with the front page layout. To buttress the point, the image of the world best footballer of the year 2008, Cristiano Ronaldo, is displayed and this therefore increases the chances that visitors of the website will turn into potential buyers.



The level of Trustworthiness

According to the research of Charkrboty and Charkrboty (2007), the level of worthiness will be not at all, below moderate, moderate, somewhat and fully trustworthy.

In the research, they found that:

· If the advertising rate, customers’ satisfaction, after-sales services, price and quality and technical know-how are average then the website could be said not to be trustworthy.

· If the advertising rate, customers’ satisfaction, after-sales services, price and quality and technical knowhow are good, then the website could be counted trustworthy.


· If the advertising rate, customers’ satisfaction, after-sales services, price and quality and technical knowhow are fair, then the trustworthiness level could be said to be fair as well.

References

Tullberg, J (2008) ‘Trust- the importance of trustfullness versus trustworthiness’, the journal of Socio-Economics ,37 (5), 2059-2071

Bolton, Gary; Loebecke, Claudia; Ockenfels, Axel ( 2008) ‘Does Competition Promote Trust and Trustworthiness in Online Trading? An Experimental Study.’ Journal of Management Information Systems, 25 (2), 145-169

Chakraborty, C and Chakraborty, D (2007), Fuzzy rule base for consumer trustworthiness in Internet Marketing: An interactive fuzzy rule classification approach, Intelligent Data Analysis, 11(4), 339-353

Wood and Andy, J (2006), NLP revisited: nonverbal communications and signals of trustworthiness.Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 26 (2),197-204

Ofuonye,E, Beatty,P, Reay,I, Dick,S, Miller J (2008), How do we build trust into E-commerce websites?Journal of E-commerce, 25(5), 7-9

Buttner, Oliver, B; Goritz and Anja, S (2008), Perceived trustworthiness of online shops... Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 7(1), 35-50