College Website Design
College applicants are often making their first independent decision, sometimes with a parent reading over their shoulder. They want to know what the course leads to, whether they can get on it, what it costs and what the place is like. Both readers are impatient with institutional language and unforgiving of information that turns out to be from last year.
Built for colleges, further education institutions and vocational colleges. Describe your business in a sentence and a complete site is written and designed for you — then you edit every word of it.
Build my website free →What a college website needs
Every one of these is included from the first draft. Nothing here is decoration — each answers a question your visitors are already asking.
Courses with outcomes
What the qualification leads to — a job, an apprenticeship, university. Applicants are buying a destination.
Entry requirements, plainly
Grades and equivalents. Ambiguity costs applications from students who would have qualified.
Fees and funding
Who pays, what support exists, and for which age groups. It is confusing and it stops applications.
Facilities and campus
Workshops, studios, equipment. For vocational courses, the facilities are much of the product.
How to apply and by when
Deadlines, interviews and what happens next. Applicants abandon where the process becomes unclear.
Support available
Learning support, careers advice, pastoral care. Parents look for this even when students do not.
Three mistakes that cost college websites customers
These come up again and again in this trade, and all three are avoidable.
- Course pages that never say what the qualification leads to.
- Entry requirements missing or written only in one qualification system.
- Deadlines left over from a previous year, which undermines trust in everything else.
- No fee or funding information for the age groups you serve.
- Institutional language written for inspectors rather than for a sixteen-year-old.
- No photographs of the actual workshops and studios, which are the main attraction for vocational courses.
- No route for parents, who are often the second reader and sometimes the deciding one.
- No open day dates, which is the single most common reason a prospective student and their parent visit the site at all.
Six college designs to start from
Every industry ships with six distinct designs. Pick one as a starting point — the layout, colours, wording and images are all yours to change afterwards.
How you get your college website
Describe the business
One or two sentences about your college is enough. No brief, no questionnaire.
Get a complete first draft
Pages, sections, images and written copy — not an empty template waiting for you to fill it in.
Edit anything, then publish
Change any word, section or colour yourself. Publish to a free address or connect your own domain.
College website questions
What matters most on a course page?
What it leads to, the entry requirements, and how to apply. Applicants are choosing a destination rather than a syllabus.
Should fees be explained?
Yes, including who qualifies for funding. It is genuinely confusing, and confusion prevents applications.
Are facilities worth showing?
For vocational courses they are much of the product. Real photographs of the workshops persuade more than any description.
How do we serve parents?
Give them support, safety and progression information. They are frequently the second reader and often the deciding one.
How often must we update?
Every cycle without fail for deadlines and entry requirements. Stale dates are the most damaging error a college site can make.
Should we show student outcomes?
Yes. Destinations — jobs, apprenticeships, universities — are the strongest evidence you can publish.
Can departments update their own pages?
They should. Course detail changes constantly and central bottlenecks are why education sites go out of date.
Should open days be on the home page?
Yes. They are among the most common reasons anyone visits a college website, and a prospective student who cannot find the next date simply looks at another college.
Websites for similar businesses
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