Higher Education Website Redesign Guide

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Key Takeaways

• Higher education websites serve more distinct audiences than almost any other category: prospective students, current students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents, donors, employers, and the general public.
• Governance is the defining challenge. Higher ed redesigns involve academic departments, administrative units, communications teams, IT, and institutional leadership, each with different priorities and levels of authority over the website.
• ADA accessibility compliance is a legal requirement for most institutions, not a best practice. Enforcement has increased, and the risk of non-compliance is real.
• Prospective student conversion is the primary ROI driver. Every other audience matters, but enrollment is the outcome that funds everything else.

The Defining Complexity of Higher Education Web Projects

Higher education institutions run some of the most complex websites in any sector.

A mid-size university might have a main institutional site, dozens of college and department sites, athletics, libraries, research institutes, continuing education, alumni affairs, a foundation, and a hospital or clinic, all with different governance structures, different content ownership, and sometimes different technical platforms.

A redesign in this environment is not a project. It is a program.

Understanding that scope difference before the first kickoff meeting is what separates institutions that complete their redesigns on schedule from those that are still in committee two years later.

The Audience Map

Before any design decision, map who the website needs to serve and what each audience needs to accomplish.

No single page serves all of these audiences equally well. The homepage, navigation, and primary conversion paths must be designed with a clear priority hierarchy.

For most institutions, prospective students are the primary audience for the main institutional site. Everything else is secondary.

The Governance Reality

Higher education website governance is one of the most commonly underestimated challenges in institutional redesign.

Academic departments expect autonomy over their corner of the web presence. Administrative units have organizational priorities that may not align with institutional messaging priorities. Faculty governance structures can require consultation processes that slow decision-making significantly.

What effective higher ed web governance requires:

A central web authority with institutional backing. This is typically a communications or marketing office with clear authority over the main institutional site and a defined relationship with departmental sites.

A content standards document that defines how departments can and cannot customize their presence within the institutional design system.

A clear escalation path for conflicts between departmental preferences and institutional standards.

A named decision-maker for the redesign project itself, with the authority to make calls without committee approval at the design level.

Institutions that run their redesign as a committee process, where every department has equal input and veto power, consistently produce websites that are incoherent at the institutional level and satisfying to no one.

Phase 1: Audit, Research, and Strategy

Higher ed redesigns need more upfront research than most web projects.

What the discovery phase covers:

• Analytics review: what current students and prospective students actually use the site for
• Usability testing: where prospective students get lost in the current site
• Competitive analysis: how peer and aspirational institutions structure and message their sites
• Enrollment team input: what questions prospective students ask before applying, where the current site fails them
• Faculty and staff survey: what internal audiences need from the site they cannot currently access
• Content inventory: how many pages exist across the institution, who owns them, and what state they are in

This phase takes eight to twelve weeks for an institution of meaningful size. Compressing it produces a redesign built on assumptions rather than evidence.

Phase 2: Information Architecture

The IA work for a higher ed site is more complex than almost any other project category.

The structural decisions that define the redesign:

Main site vs. microsite vs. department site model. Should colleges and schools have their own full sites, sections within the main site, or a hybrid? This is a governance decision as much as a design decision, and it has major implications for CMS configuration and ongoing maintenance burden.

Content ownership model. Who can publish what, and with what level of review? Distributed publishing with central style enforcement is common; centralized publishing for the main site with departmental autonomy below a certain level is another common model.

Navigation architecture. Most higher ed sites have navigation problems rooted in internal organizational thinking: organized by unit rather than by what students need. The IA work should be anchored in the prospective student journey, not the org chart.

Prospective Student Experience: The Redesign's Primary ROI Driver

For most institutions, a one-percentage-point improvement in application or enrollment yield has a dollar value that dwarfs the cost of the redesign.

What a high-converting prospective student experience requires:

• Program pages that lead with outcomes and career data, not curriculum requirements
• A visible, accessible net cost calculator or tuition transparency tool
• Student voices: quotes, profiles, and videos from current students, not from administrators
• A clear application process explained simply, with deadlines prominent
• A fast, simple inquiry or visit scheduling flow
• Mobile-optimized experience from start to finish (more than 60% of prospective student visits are mobile)

The university website redesign covers the specific differences between redesigning the main institutional site and redesigning individual college or program sites within the broader institutional presence.

Accessibility: A Legal Requirement, Not a Guideline

Title II of the ADA and Section 508 apply to most higher education institutions. The Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has issued resolution agreements related to inaccessible higher education websites, and enforcement activity has increased.

Accessibility requirements for higher education websites:

• WCAG 2.1 AA compliance is the standard currently referenced in enforcement actions
• All PDFs linked from the site must be accessible (tagged, readable by screen readers)
• All video content must have closed captions
• Online forms must be operable by keyboard and screen reader
• The CMS and any third-party tools integrated into the site must support accessible authoring

Accessibility cannot be a post-launch remediation project. It must be built into the design system, tested throughout development, and audited by an accessibility specialist before launch.

CMS Selection for Higher Education

CMS choice in higher ed is a major decision with long consequences.

Common platforms in the sector:

The platform decision must account for IT department capacity, ongoing support costs, and whether the institution wants to maintain its own servers or move to SaaS hosting.

Community College Considerations

Community college redesigns share most characteristics with university redesigns but differ in several important ways.

Community college students are more likely to be accessing the site on a mobile device with a slower connection. They are more likely to be non-traditional students, parents, or career changers who are less familiar with how to navigate institutional websites.

The community college website redesign context puts an even higher premium on plain language, simple navigation, and prominently accessible financial aid and application information.

Budget and Timeline Expectations

Higher education redesigns are long, expensive projects.

The website redesign cost for universities covers the specific cost drivers that push higher ed projects above or below these ranges, including governance complexity, content migration scope, and accessibility remediation requirements.

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What Separates Successful Higher Ed Redesigns

Institutions that complete their redesigns on time and within budget share a consistent set of characteristics.

They named a decision-maker with real authority before work began. They invested in user research with actual prospective students, not just with internal stakeholders. They treated accessibility as a design constraint, not a checklist at the end. They made clear platform decisions and committed to them.

Institutions that struggle have the opposite characteristics: design-by-committee, governance disagreements that surface mid-project, accessibility discovered too late, and platform decisions that get relitigated after development begins.

LOW/CODE Agency is a leading AI product team for SMBs and startups. While large flagship university redesigns require specialized institutional vendors, smaller institutions, professional schools, and continuing education programs evaluating a more agile approach will find that we bring the structure and user-experience discipline these projects require.

Website projects start at $10,000+. Book a 30-minute call