With four out of ten would-be university students choosing their seat of learning by researching via university websites, the Daily Telegraph recently reported that some universities spend well over a quarter of a million pounds each year on maintaining their sites.

So it’s great news that the Sitemorse quarterly INDEX of universities and higher education sites shows a number of establishments moving significantly up the table covering more than 330 university and college sites.

The Sitemorse Q3 2014 Universities web benchmark is an important indicator of the educational establishments currently leading the field with the best-working sites in the higher education sector.

Highest marks this Index have been awarded to Warwickshire College once again. Not only has the college kept its top spot in our benchmark for the third quarter on the run, it has improved its overall score to 8.6 out of a possible 10 marks for criteria including code quality, accessibility, function and performance.

Warwickshire College is one of the largest general further and higher education colleges in the UK, providing high quality education and training for more than 18,000 students each year. The college has six centres in Leamington, Warwick, Rugby, Moreton Morrell, Henley-in-Arden and Pershore in Worcestershire.

Close behind Warwickshire College, however is Futurelearn, a new organisation offering online-only courses which has powered up the Sitemorse table in only twelve months, moving from 202nd place to 2nd in three jumps. Amazingly, the Futurelearn site is still in beta mode, but still managed to score 8.1/10 in our testing.

FutureLearn, which describes itself as the new UK-based social learning platform, is the first UK-led MOOC (massive open online course) provider and is a private company wholly owned by The Open University, with the benefit of over 40 years of their experience in distance learning and online education.

Futurelearn’s partners include over 20 of the best UK and international universities, as well as institutions with a huge archive of cultural and educational material, including the British Council, the British Library, and the British Museum, and it plans to partner with two Chinese universities – Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Fudan University - shortly.

Making up the remainder of the top five best performers are the websites of Easton and Otley College, Norwich Henley College, Coventry and the Grimsby Institute of Further and Higher Education in the North-East of England.
Highest climbers this time are the City of Bristol College (+157), Carshalton College (+160), The Manchester College (+162), University of Wolverhampton (+166) and London's Rose Bruford College (+313), which specialises in the performing arts. Full index data can be seen on our website, www.sitemorse.com.

University College, Birmingham maintains the highest score for accessibility (9/10), with good scores also in this area for De Montfort Uni, Leicester and Grimsby Institute of Further and Higher Education. Fastest sites to respond were St. Mary’s University College, Twickenham and the College of West Anglia.