I’ve just noticed an interesting trend over at Google Trends, and it’s confirmed by both Compete and Alexa. The traffic to the University of Wolverhampton web site has collapsed.
Google Trends:
Alexa:
Compete:
There are lots of potential reasons for the decline in the traffic: obviously changes in student behaviour (e.g., Google Scholar rather than the OPAC), increasing number of satellite web sites (e.g., individual/departmental blogs). But does this really account for such a massive decline? A brief glance at some other university web sites showed some decline in traffic, but I didn’t notice them falling as sharply.
Whilst I’d suggest the university have a good dig around in their data to find out exactly what is going on, as much as anything it highlights the need for a change in how we think of a successful online web presence.