AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

This project has performed a reception analysis of the RU website along with 3 other European websites, to determine how these perform from the perspective of an exchange student segment and from the perspective of the general societal trends of “information overload” and Web 2.0. The reception analysis was performed with 3 exchange students at Roskilde University who filled out both qualitative and quantitative questions about the websites of Roskilde (ruc.dk), Dogus (dogus.edu.tr), Paris-Sorbonne (english.paris-sorbonne.fr) and Helsinki University (helsinki.fi/university). The main findings of the project paper is that all of the universities perform from poor to average with this segment, and that this might be due to the fact that they do not consider their websites their primary channel of distribution. This is seen in the way the universities do not themselves have in-house capabilities to change design features of their websites, and as such cannot live up to the push towards Web 2.0. Finally, we conclude that it may be tough to separate branding from the functionality of a website since they seem to go hand in hand.