The University of Cape Town's online presence has earned it top honours in Africa on the newly released Webometric Ranking of World Universities rankings.
Published twice a year by the Cybermetrics lab since 2004, the ranking uses various web indicators to evaluate more than 20000 global universities.
UCT communication and marketing department deputy director Kylie Hatton attributed a large part of its success to the multiple platforms to reach different audiences as well as integrating online communications with social media.
"We update our website daily and often hourly with breaking news, and have a weekly unique user rate of 95539 [between July 23 and July 29].
"We want to make our website more multimedia driven and visually appealing, and are currently revising its content architecture to hopefully improve the user experience even more."
Researchers at Cybermetrics use web content, web visibility and web impact to determine ranking.
The number of links and pages on the site domain; files in online formats such as pdf, doc, docxa and ppt; articles, papers and citations in the academic domain; as well as articles published in high impact, international journals all contribute to the indicator calculation.
UCT recently launched the OpenUCT institutional repository - a platform for staff to share their research, teaching and learning content with the world.
Stellenbosch University, the University of Pretoria, University of the Witwatersrand, University of KwaZulu-Natal and the University of the Western Cape came in at three to seventh, respectively.
Cairo University was second. The American University in Cairo, University of Nairobi and Mansoura University secured eighth, ninth and 10th spots.
Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, which moved up 105 spots to position 26, currently has an average of 40000 page views a day on its website.
NMMU spokesman Roslyn Baatjies said it s online presence ranged from an app for smartphones, a mobile version of the site and Facebook to Twitter accounts.
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