How To Redesign A University Website

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Key Takeaways

• University website redesigns fail more often than most other institutional web projects, not because of technical complexity, but because of governance: too many stakeholders, no clear decision-making authority, and content that never gets written or approved.
• Prospective student conversion is the primary business case for most university redesign investments, but most universities design their main website for the full range of audiences rather than optimizing for enrollment. This often serves everyone poorly.
• The most important decision made in a university redesign is scope: what is in this project and what is not. Scope creep, driven by the legitimate needs of individual colleges and departments, has killed more university redesign projects than any technical challenge.
• Section 508 / WCAG accessibility compliance is legally required for most US universities and should be designed into the project from the beginning, not added as a QA task before launch.

Before the Project Begins: The Governance Question

The single most important pre-project question for a university redesign is not "what should the new site look like?" It is "who has final authority to make decisions when stakeholders disagree?"

University websites involve legitimate competing interests from: central administration, the marketing and communications office, individual colleges and schools, academic departments, athletics, alumni relations, student affairs, IT, legal and compliance, and the provost or president's office.

Each of these groups has a real stake in how the website represents the institution. None of them will defer to a single decision-maker without that authority being explicitly established and backed by senior leadership.

Before the first RFP is issued:

Define the governance structure in writing. Who owns the project? Who has final authority over design decisions? Who has final authority over content decisions by section? What is the escalation path for disagreements?

Universities that skip this step discover the governance problem mid-project, when it is far more expensive to resolve.

Defining Scope: The Decision That Determines Everything

University websites are not single websites. They are ecosystems of interconnected web properties: the main institutional site, individual college and school sites, departmental sites, program pages, research center sites, athletics, alumni, the library, student services portals, and more.

The scope decision framework:

What this project must accomplish: The main institutional site redesign. This is the minimum viable scope for any university web redesign project.

What this project may include, with appropriate budget and time: A college or school template that enables decentralized sites to be rebuilt on the new platform over time. A department page migration guide. Content governance standards.

What this project will explicitly not include: Individual departmental site builds, research center sites, student organization pages, legacy microsites. These are deferred to future phases or to department-level projects.

The scope document must be written, approved by senior leadership, and referenced explicitly when scope expansion requests arrive during the project, which they will.

The Prospective Student Path: The Highest-Priority Design Problem

Most universities have a mixed audience for their main website. The redesign conversation often devolves into an argument about how to balance prospective student enrollment needs with alumni engagement, current student services, faculty resources, and community relations.

The honest answer is that the main site cannot equally serve all of these audiences optimally.

What the evidence consistently shows:

Prospective students are the highest-value audience for most institutional websites because enrollment revenue is the financial foundation of the university. Research from the higher education sector consistently shows that prospective students visit the institutional website before any other source when evaluating a university.

The primary conversion question a prospective student brings to the institutional website: is this the kind of place where someone like me belongs and can succeed?

What serves that question:

• Specific academic program information, searchable by major or career interest
• Student life content that shows (not just describes) what campus culture looks like
• Outcome data: graduation rates, employment rates, average starting salary by major
• Clear application information with deadlines and requirements
• Financial aid and scholarship information presented as a cost-access pathway, not buried in a financial aid office section

The higher education website redesign guide covers the full audience architecture for higher education sites, including how to balance prospective student conversion with the needs of current students, faculty, and alumni.

Step 1: Discovery and Audience Research

A university redesign that begins in Figma before discovery is complete will redesign the wrong thing.

Discovery deliverables:

Analytics audit: What pages receive the most traffic? What paths do prospective students take through the current site? Where do they drop off? What search terms arrive on the site and fail to find the right content?

Stakeholder interviews: 10 to 20 interviews across major constituent groups. The goal is not to collect design preferences. It is to understand what content and functionality each group needs from the website to do their jobs or make their decisions.

Prospective student research: Survey or interview current students and recent admits about what they needed from the university website during their decision process and what they could not find.

Competitive audit: How do comparable institutions present their sites? What content and functionality are they offering? Where does this institution have a meaningful differentiator?

Technical audit: What CMS platform is in use? What integrations exist (Banner, Slate, PeopleSoft, Ellucian)? What accessibility debt exists? What security or performance issues must be resolved regardless of the redesign?

Step 2: Information Architecture Before Design

University websites fail architecturally more often than visually. The information is somewhere on the site. It is just impossible to find.

Information architecture work must precede visual design in a university redesign. The IA deliverable is a sitemap and content hierarchy that reflects how different audiences navigate to their most important content, not how the institution organizes itself administratively.

Common IA corrections in university redesigns:

• Moving application and program information to primary navigation rather than burying it under "Academics"
• Creating a "Cost and Aid" section that consolidates tuition, fees, financial aid, and scholarship information that is currently scattered across three separate offices' pages
• Designing a single unified event calendar rather than a separate calendar per department
• Building a central faculty directory searchable by department, research area, and specialty

The IA phase typically requires 4 to 8 weeks for a main institutional site redesign, depending on site size.

Step 3: Accessibility From the Start

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and the ADA both apply to most US universities. Courts have consistently ruled that university websites must be accessible. The Department of Education and DOJ have taken enforcement positions that are increasingly clear.

WCAG 2.1 AA is the standard. WCAG 2.2 AA is the emerging target.

Accessibility requirements that must be built into the design process, not retrofitted:

• Color contrast: minimum 4.5:1 for body text, 3:1 for large text and UI components
• Keyboard navigation: all interactive elements operable without a mouse
• Screen reader compatibility: headings, landmarks, image alt text, and ARIA attributes correctly implemented
• Form accessibility: labels, error messages, and required field indicators accessible
• Video captions: all video content with accurate closed captions
• Document accessibility: PDFs linked from the site must also meet accessibility standards

Planning for accessibility retrofits after design and development is expensive and produces lower-quality outcomes than designing accessibly from the beginning.

Step 4: CMS Selection for University Governance

The CMS choice for a university website must support decentralized content governance at scale.

CMS considerations specific to universities:

Decentralized editing: Hundreds of content editors across departments and colleges need to update their own sections without breaking the overall design. The CMS must have role-based permissions and template-based editing that constrains editors to design-safe changes.

Integration requirements: Integration with the SIS (Banner, Ellucian, PeopleSoft), the CRM (Slate, Salesforce), the LMS (Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace), and event management systems.

Accessibility enforcement: Some CMS platforms include accessibility checking tools that flag content issues before publication.

Scale: Universities with tens of thousands of pages need a CMS that performs well at that scale without slowing page loads or editor experience.

Common CMS platforms in university environments: Drupal (open source, highly extensible, widely used in higher ed), WordPress with multisite, Sitecore, Cascade CMS (purpose-built for higher education), and OmniUpdate (now Modern Campus).

Step 5: Content Strategy and Migration

A university main site redesign involves migrating thousands to tens of thousands of pages.

Most of them should not be migrated.

The content strategy approach:

Start with a content inventory and audit that assesses each section for: traffic, recency, accuracy, and alignment with the redesign's priority audiences.

Content that is outdated, low-traffic, and not priority-audience-relevant should be archived, not migrated. Content that is needed but poorly written should be rewritten, not migrated as-is.

The content migration plan must be owned by the communications team with specific content owners assigned per section. No content migration plan that relies on general stakeholder goodwill to produce new content will succeed. Content owners must be named, accountable, and given realistic deadlines.

The university website redesign guide covers the full scope and architecture decisions for university web projects, including the main site versus college site versus departmental site hierarchy that determines what this project covers and what must be deferred.

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What University Website Redesigns Cost

Timeline ranges from 12 to 24 months for main site projects at research universities.

LOW/CODE Agency is a leading AI product team for SMBs and startups. University and higher education web projects at the size and complexity where a more agile team with deep conversion expertise can add value alongside institutional stakeholders will find we bring the rigor and the perspective to make the project succeed.

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