Leadership adds real value to the offer presented on websites and a well-presented leadership profile is critical to outcomes. The psychological and sociological needs of website users – potential, current and past students, parents, stakeholders, and Whitehall budget holders, and just as importantly College staff – includes a desire for the reassurance of authority. The purpose of this more than usually critical report is to show how leadership and authority is expressed especially because most stakeholders using the website will never meet College leaders is.

The obvious issues are clear to see and the grade reflects this but there are a range of issues that viewers of this report may be entirely unaware of. This is probably a good point to call for a focus on digital skills and a course curriculum that teaches these skills. I have reviewed the digital operations offer by Colleges nationwide and it will be interesting to get faculty opinions on the level of digital skills presented on this singular comparative aspect of College websites.

Just to be clear, I am no sycophant, but this more than normally critical report is the way it is because effectively addressing this sectorwide issue of poorly presenting College leadership profiles, must be reasonably straightforward to achieve. If it isn’t then this would explain a great deal about the rest of the content and technical issues with the online offer Colleges’ present to website users.

The best article short listing all the most useful and straightforward techniques for creating high quality corporate portrait photographs is Make Sure Your Headshot Matches Your Brand by Kate Harrison in Forbes Magazine. For a more technical article the best found so far is How to Photograph Corporate Portraits by Nasim Mansurov in Photography Life.

Anyway, if you see issues that have been missed or assets that have been overlooked then feel free to ping us an email using This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Portrait Photographs

Brightness, Colour, & Contrast

Too much brightness in a photograph is called overexposure, too little colour is undersaturation, and too little contrast is described as being flat or dull. There are an incredibly high number of portraits that are undersaturated and dull or overexposed and with burned out backgrounds or skylines. It is simple good practice to use Pixlr Editor to tweak the brightness, colour and contrast of every image used on the website, with the obvious provision that it isn’t ever noticeably blatant.

Framing & Dimensions

There are three basic dimensions/aspect rations: square, landscape rectangle and portrait rectangle. All portraits need to be portrait shaped and a second, cropped version, is needed for social media avatars. The portrait subject needs to be centre and the eye line positioned approximately two thirds up the image. It is an art but it is also a pretty straightforward art to master.

File Size

300x400px portrait is 120,000px, 3000x4000px portrait is 12,000,000px (12 MILLION PIXELS!). Why inconvenience website users by not insisting that a website version of all images be generated that are approximately the same size as is being displayed?
http://www.boston.ac.uk/about-us/PublishingImages/Jo%20Maher%20Headshot-1319.jpg (In ASCII %20 is space; see File Name (SEO) below)

95x95px portraits are just as bad. Is it too difficult to utilise multiple image sizes or is the instruction selection that of lowest common denominator?
http://www.activatelearning.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Sally-Dicketts_0.jpg

File Name (SEO)

Hyphen for spaces and full name. The options are to include the job title and organisation. This is level 1 SEO: Jed-Keenan-Website-Officer-Havering-College.jpg instead of F117440-e1373018856884-237x300.jpg

Purpose & (Quality) Effort

Repurposed images, group shots and worse, cropped group shots, publicity shots from public presentations, out-of-focus shots, low quality smartphone snapshots and entrance pass mugshots, masked backgrounds, jokey content, embedded graphics, Dutch angle framing, blatant filters, oddly adjusted colour balance, low resolution pixilation, and, the ultimate sin, a subject standing with his hands in pockets. There are many other basic composition issues, such as being too far from the photographer or obscured by office furniture and equipment.

Not Even Bothering!

95 Colleges do not feature an image or their Principal and/or Chief Executive Officer!

LinkedIn Profiles

We run lots of student work experience placements and every student is required to properly set up their LinkedIn account. The reason students, staff and leaders all need a LinkedIn account is because corporate recruitment is increasingly based upon searching LinkedIn; just ask your CIPD Accredited HR Manager if they have a LinkedIn recruitment account, they should if don’t already. The account doesn’t need to be active, to be good enough it just needs to be up to date and fully populated.

For the College, it is of critical importance for the Principal and/or Chief Executive Officer (CEO) LinkedIn profile to look great. Again, it does not need to be active but as a figurehead and an example to us all it needs to be good enough. Principals and CEOs are the public face and network node, they are the singular expression of the status of the organisation and quality of the offer, they are the Civil Servants’ and Elected Representatives’ local strategic partner, and critically the litmus test for the sector’s status in Whitehall. Most critically they are real examples of the possibilities and best practice to hard working students, especially for those students lack for sufficient high status role models.

As an aside, feel free to look at the recently updated review of the Corporate Logos used on LinkedIn accounts.

Profiles & Welcomes

Profiles and portrait image optimise a website and 210 College websites do not feature even a short sentence on the experience and expertise of their College’s highest paid employee.

As an aside, feel free to look at the old People People People Review from this time last year.

Contact Details

Gatekeepers will always have totally reasonable objections for direct communication with College Leaders but then just ask the Principal and/or CEO about student feedback data and they will pretty much all reply that of course they welcome all dialogues that develop qualitative performance data. That said only 31 from 458 College Websites list their Principal and/or CEO’s contact details.

The best article that simply lists the value of direct feedback to College Principals and/or CEOs is 11 Insights Gained From Executives Listening To Customers by the Forbes Technology Council in Forbes Magazine. And the best article on direct feedback from the perspective of service users is Got a customer complaint? Take it up with the CEO by Donna Ferguson in The Guardian.

Results

Only 10 Colleges reach 5 stars level of performance:

• City of Glasgow College

• East Kent College

• East Surrey College

• Middlesbrough College

• Petroc College

• Richard Taunton College

• Seevic College

• Stoke-on-Trent College

• Wakefield College

• Warwickshire College Group