Your website is a very important marketing tool for your college or university when it comes to communicating with your community. It is often the first place that prospective students will go to learn more; where current students go to learn about ways to get involved; and where alumni go to find out how to support their Alma mater.
If you don’t give the target groups the information they need on your website, you could lose prospective students or alumni donations. To make your website more functional, attractive and useful, your digital team should figure out what visitors are looking for and make it easy to find the correct information.
The following tips will help you improve your website and make it more inviting. These tips cover topics such as website architecture and graphic design. By following these tips, you can create a strong online presence for your college or university.
1. Consider your institution’s needs
Before you start implementing any design tips on your college or university’s website, think about what you want the site to achieve and who it is for. This will help ensure that the tips you use are actually beneficial to your school.
The list of objectives for a college or university website will look different from school to school, so don’t worry about finding the perfect plan. Instead, ask yourself and other department/school stakeholders the following questions to determine what the website should prioritize:
- Which audience primarily comes to our website, or which audience do we want to come to our website? Understanding which audience primarily comes to your site, or even better, which audience you want to come to your site, will help you determine what content should be served and will influence ways to encourage them to spend more time on the site.
- What are the programs that visitors are searching for on our site? Are we highlighting our key programs to the best of our abilities?
- Is our website an important source of information for individuals who aren’t prospective students, faculty, or alumni? Are we including readers like researchers, current students, or parents in our plans and making it easy for them to benefit from our resources?
Answer the following questions to help improve the design of your institution’s website.
2. Start with a strong foundation
While it is important for your website to look good, it’s even more crucial for your website to function properly. If it is difficult to navigate or full of broken links, you can lose out on prospective students or donations from alumni.
To have your website perform at its best, take a look at the framework, or Content Management System (CMS) you’re using. A CMS is the software that provides the infrastructure for your website and enables users to interact with it.
Your website’s compatibility with other software solutions is dependent on your CMS.
Your CMS is the most important part of your website, so it’s imperative that it provides the tools you need, not just for you, but for everyone who will be using the CMS to update and add to the website. This includes:
- Content contributors.
- Content approvers or supervisors.
- Web developers or programmers.
- Marketing specialists.
- Administrators.
A content management system that allows different team members to work together efficiently to provide visitors with the information they want about your institution is the best option for higher education. Click here for more information about the best content management system options for higher education.
3. Look for examples
Once you’ve decided which aspects of your website are the most important and have chosen a content management system to act as the foundation of your site, you’ll need to decide what the most effective visual design elements are for your site.
What feeling do you want your website to evoke in visitors? Are you trying to make them feel welcome, excited, empowered, or curious?
Find college and university websites that make you feel the same way you want your visitors to feel on your site. Try to figure out what about the design of those sites caused those emotions.
While your school’s brand styling, colors, and logos will heavily influence the design of your site, you’ll want to look for examples of:
- Navigation and menu styles
- Images
- Use of videos or GIFs
A website should not only have these characteristics, but also be mobile-responsive and promote your social media presences.
It’s important for your website’s visual impact to be unique, but there’s no harm in learning from other sites with great design.
4. Don’t prioritize the wrong content
I have been told by staff members that they prioritize information that is important to the department or university first because they believe it will make people engage with that content before they do what they originally came to do. However, this is not what people want or how they actually behave.
The first items on a page signal what’s important. When you start with the content you want users to look at, you’re saying two things to them:
- This page is irrelevant to you.
- We don’t care about what’s important to you; here’s our stuff instead.
If people are faced with irrelevant content, they may become frustrated or confused. This can cause them to leave the page without taking any action. This may be because they think they can complete the task more quickly some other way, or because they don’t realize that the page contains what they’re looking for.
The following text is discussing the negative effects of bad customer service. This includes decreased online engagement and increased phone calls from frustrated customers.
Do This Instead
You should make what your visitors want to do the most prominent thing on your page. It might sound counterintuitive, but making it easy for people to complete their tasks makes it more likely that they’ll engage with your other content.
5. Create an easy-to-scan content, and not purely academic writing
This means that the website should be concise, clear, and to the point. Most higher education websites are written by academics who work in the department that owns that particular page or section. These academics are used to writing long, detailed papers. However, for a public university website, the majority of users are students and their parents, not career academics. This means the website should be more concise, clear, and to the point.
The Secret: Everyone is task-oriented online.
Even academics who are really dedicated to their work don’t want to read a long, complicated piece of text just to find the right form to submit or pay a parking ticket. Believe me, there’s a time for reading things that are dense and difficult. In the middle of trying to complete an online task is not that time. Not for anyone.
Web writing needs to be concise and to the point so that users can quickly find what they are looking for. Academic writing is more detailed and usually contains arguments or points that need to be proven. Online, users are not looking to read a lot of text, but rather to get something done. Therefore, web writing should be easy to scan and understand so that users can find what they need withoutputting in a lot of effort.
Creating Easy-to-Scan Content
Some universities think that making your content easy to scan means writing something more like marketing copy than academic prose. Here’s how to best organize actions and tasks within the content area:
- Give Directions, Not Exposition — Think of your online content as signposts and roadside directions, rather than as an essay or article.
- Prioritize User Actions — Prioritize visitors’ tasks prominently at the top of the page.
- Write Concise, Descriptive Titles — Use headings and keep supporting copy to a bare minimum to keep information at a manageable level.
- Create Brief and Clear Calls to Action — Offer descriptive, clear, short calls to action so visitors can easily understand what they need to do.
This means you must avoid:
Really, no paragraphs. Higher education institutions are the biggest offender of overly verbose web pages. They say in three sentences what could have been better said in five words.
If there is an important action or link on a web page, it should be called out with a heading or button, so that people will notice it. Links that are buried inside sentences are likely to go unnoticed.
Read the text below to learn about unnecessary copy on university web pages. Most university web pages have too much unnecessary copy. This includes long introduction paragraphs or explanations of irrelevant internal concerns. To fix this, the copy should be cut mercilessly. If the text is not directly serving thepurpose of the page, it should be removed. In many cases, cutting the content by 90 percent will suffice. However, if it feels difficult to cut that much, go back and cut another 50 percent of the words on the page.
Don’t allow departments to write their own content.
If the department does not have a dedicated communications specialist who understands web copy and can devote time to writing a website, department heads and staff members will not be able to write online content.
If departments are allowed to write their own web pages, the content will be uninviting and difficult to read, like an academic paper.
6. Avoid an unrelenting internal focus
Many universities create their websites with a very clear goal or purpose in mind. Here are some particularly egregious mistakes I’ve seen on nearly every university website ever:
This type of navigation is focused on the organization of university divisions, departments, and offices, and often only makes sense to the people who work there.
Using inside jargon in titles and headings can make it difficult for people using the website to understand what they are looking at.
The home or landing page and several sub-navigation sections shouldn’t be filled with content that has nothing to do with user tasks.
Most university websites have a main landing page with a welcome letter from the dean or department head. These letters are usually full of irrelevant information and can be a waste of time to read.
Why it’s a problem: By far the biggest misalignment we see is a disregard for what’s important to customers. If a company’s mission or values statement takes up a lot of space on their website or other materials, it shows that they care more about themselves than their customers. This is a problem because it shows a lack of understanding of what customers want and care about.
Universities should focus on their internal initiatives, programs, and goals before thinking about the needs of their users.
7. Keep accessibility in mind
If your website is not accessible to all visitors in accordance with the Office of Civil Rights, you may miss out on some prospective students and face legal consequences.
To avoid these consequences, prioritize these best practices:
- Make sure that your headers are tagged and nested correctly.
- Use a combination of automatic and human review to ensure ease of access.
- Make sure that your images have alt text.
- Provide transcripts or captioning for videos and voiceovers.
It is better to design a website that is accessible from the start, so that you do not have to make a lot of changes later.
Find more strategies, research, and insights for a great higher education website
When designing your college or university website, there are some best practices you should follow to make sure the site is accessible and functional for all users, as well as attractive. If visitors can easily find what they need on the site, they are more likely to stay on it and convert from being a prospective student to an applicant, or from being an alumni to a donor.
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