A higher education website redesign should make it easier for people to understand their options and take the right next step. For prospective students, that means finding a relevant program, evaluating its fit, understanding costs and requirements, and knowing how to move forward.
Visual design matters. But before approving a new homepage, a marketing team needs agreement on the decisions the website should support, the content those decisions require, and the measures that will show whether the experience improved.
This guide offers a planning framework for US college and university marketing teams, followed by a scorecard you can adapt to your own institution.
What should a university website redesign accomplish?
A useful redesign brief defines the audience, its important tasks, the barriers in the current experience, and the evidence needed to evaluate the new one. It also establishes who will maintain the content after launch.
Start by choosing a primary audience for each major journey. A graduate prospect researching part-time study has different questions from a first-year student exploring campus life. Current students, faculty, alumni, and community members also need clear paths; treating them as secondary on a recruitment page does not mean making their information harder to reach.
Write objectives as observable changes. “Improve the graduate experience” is difficult to evaluate. “Help graduate prospects find program format, application requirements, and the next intake date without contacting an office” gives research, content, and design teams something concrete to test.
Which student questions should shape academic program pages?
Review program content before choosing page layouts. Use student interviews, admissions questions, site-search terms, and available analytics to identify uncertainty. Then build a common content model that allows programs to explain their differences.
- Fit: Who is the program for, and what preparation does it expect?
- Format: Where and how does learning happen? What attendance or scheduling commitments apply?
- Investment: What are the tuition and applicable fees, and where can students confirm current information?
- Requirements: What does an application need, and which deadlines apply?
- Value: What will students learn? What evidence supports any claims about opportunities or outcomes?
- Action: Should this visitor request information, attend an event, speak with someone, or apply?
A program page should answer enough to support a decision and link clearly to authoritative details. Avoid maintaining competing versions of tuition, deadlines, and requirements across multiple pages.
How do you turn institutional priorities into useful navigation?
Ask participants to complete realistic tasks using a prototype: find a graduate program, check whether its schedule fits their needs, locate a deadline, or find a contact. Observe where they hesitate and what labels they expect.
Internal department names may work well for staff and poorly for visitors. Test the labels rather than deciding by preference. Include mobile navigation, search results, and pages reached directly from campaigns or search engines; the homepage is only one entry point.
A useful discussion question is: if this page were the first page someone saw, would they understand where they are and what to do next?
What should the redesign scorecard include?
Use the worksheet below in discovery and again before launch. It is a proposed planning tool, not a validated benchmark. Define targets from your institution’s baseline and research rather than borrowing universal conversion targets.
| Area | Question to resolve | Evidence or acceptance check | Suggested accountable owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Student tasks | Can priority audiences complete their important tasks? | Document observed completion, hesitation, and errors in comparable task tests. | Web strategy lead |
| Program content | Are decision-critical facts clear, accurate, and consistent? | Review an agreed sample against the program content model and authoritative sources. | Content lead with program owners |
| Inquiry journey | Can visitors understand and complete the next step? | Test forms, confirmation messages, and routing to admissions; verify successful submissions. | Enrollment operations lead |
| Accessibility | Can people use the experience with different access needs? | Combine automated checks with manual keyboard, form, and assistive-technology testing. | Accessibility lead |
| Search continuity | Will useful old links reach relevant new destinations? | Test URL mappings, redirects, internal links, canonical URLs, and indexing directives. | Technical web lead |
| Measurement | Can the team distinguish interest from meaningful progression? | Verify event definitions, successful-submission tracking, cohort rules, and reporting ownership. | Analytics lead |
| Maintenance | Who keeps each important content type accurate? | Record owners, review triggers, escalation paths, and approved update workflows. | Content governance lead |
For each row, add a baseline, target, responsible contributors, and due date in your working document. One accountable owner can coordinate several contributors. “Everyone owns it” is not a usable escalation path.
How should accessibility and forms be handled?
Include accessibility in the design and content workflow rather than saving it for the final review. Test important journeys with a keyboard, review headings and focus behavior, and check how people receive instructions and errors.
For inquiry forms, use clear labels, explain required information, and give useful feedback when an entry needs correction. The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative’s forms tutorial provides practical guidance on labels, instructions, validation, and notifications.
Test the operational handoff as well as the interface: does a successful submission reach the intended system and team? A working button is not proof that an inquiry has been delivered.
How do you protect search visibility during launch?
If URLs change, create an old-to-new mapping before migration. Redirect important pages to relevant replacements, update internal links, and check canonical URLs and indexing directives. Avoid sending unrelated old pages to the homepage.
Google’s site-move guidance recommends permanent server-side redirects where possible and checking the new site’s sitemap and crawl behavior. Plan time to monitor the transition; a new design does not automatically preserve discovery.
Which metrics show whether the redesign worked?
Use a small set of measures linked to the redesign objectives: task completion in research, successful inquiries, progression toward application, and the accuracy of priority content. Keep definitions and denominators visible.
An application-button click is not an application start unless the application system confirms that event. A successful inquiry is not necessarily a qualified prospect. If your systems can connect marketing activity to applications or enrollment, compare equivalent cohorts and allow enough time for decisions to mature.
Also account for seasonality, changes in media spend, program availability, and admissions policy. A before-and-after increase is useful evidence to investigate; by itself, it does not establish that the redesign caused the change.
Who owns the website after launch?
Assign responsibility for content standards, authoritative data, publishing permissions, and review cycles during planning. The University of Iowa’s content strategy guidance connects user needs with governance and ongoing maintenance. That is a useful reminder that content work continues beyond launch.
Start with one priority journey, a representative set of program pages, and the worksheet above. Resolve content and ownership questions early, test the experience, and use what you learn to guide the wider redesign.
For a conversation about higher education website strategy, content, or measurement, connect with Vivek Arora.