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64 College Web Style Guides Reviewed

As part of my master’s thesis (as well as part of my job responsibilities) I decided to create a web style guide for the community college that employed me. Part of the process was surveying the field; we chose the first 64 results from a Google search for “web style guide”. We wanted to see what others had done and how readily the guide was implemented on the school website. Once we collected the 64 URLs, we tested the web pages against the WC3 evaulator as well as WebAim’s WAVE accessibility evaluator. The results were sobering.

Only 25% of the web pages surveyed passed the W3C X/HTML validator, 46%  passed the CSS validator, and only 34% passed the WAVE validator. The oldest web style guide was last updated in 1997, with the most current updated in 2008, and 48% showed no date stamp. More disheartening was the fact that out of 64 higher education web style guides tested, only 2 passed all three tests: Iowa State University and Penn State University. On the flip side, 25% of the web style guide web pages tested failed all three tests.

Clearly, there was no correlation between the quality of a web style guide and the quality of the corresponding website: exemplary web style guides were found on sub-par websites, and vice-versa. Read the about the results here.

Posted by Jesse on 09/22 at 01:28 PM

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