Beagle - 11:35 pm on May 3, 2007 (gmt 0)

[A note that, of course, the following is all broad generalization. But it accurately represents what I've seen.]

If Google said today that standard compliant site, accessible and usable site will get a significant boost in the SERPs, how long do you think it will take for all the 'universities, research institutions, and very well respected ecommerce stores' to get their act together and have their site validate, be more usable and more accessible?

I don't know about the ecommerce stores, but I can tell you that the majority of people who have anything to do with most university and (to a smaller degree) research institute websites would have no idea what that quote is talking about. (Just judging from my own experience, research institutes are more likely to have one centrally-run website than universities are, and can usually find someone who knows how to run it.)

The university I work for (in a medical research department) has one of the better IT teams around, but it's understaffed for even taking care of day-to-day operations, and can't control what departments, let alone individual faculty members, put online. The medical school is glacially introducing a CMS, which should help if it ever gets finished. Problem is, it's not mandatory, so even when it's fully implemented a lot of people will still be doing their own thing - which often means using FrontPage and being happy if they can get their nav buttons to work.

An idea of what the above quote would elicit from most university research department "webmasters":

What's Google? (MSN is much preferred, for the minority who know what a search engine is. But why wouldn't you just bookmark PubMed?)

Hey, we're really good at "standards compliant" when it comes to dealing with NIH and the IRB, but what does it have to do with the internet?

Validate? Oh, sure - We validate a study when we can reproduce the results. What's a "validating site?" - Of course, it's the site (NIH's term for an institution) where the research is done!

Accessibility is very important - Our entire campus is accessible. But I thought this was supposed to be about computers...?

Usable?
"Hey, my nav buttons work!"
"Wow, how'd you do that?"

SERPS? -- C'mon, get real. The departments/faculty running their own sites don't know what the letters stand for. The pros on the IT team don't care. If they worry about accessibility it's because it's the right thing to do, not because of search engines.

-------The possibly saving grace is that most of the websites are simple, which is usually a good thing for accessibility. But if a full professor learns how to implement Flash - RUN! :o