University Website Design
A prospective student arrives with a subject in mind and three questions: can I get in, what does it cost, and what is it like to be there. Course pages carrying entry requirements and fees do more work than any amount of campus photography. International applicants have a fourth question, about visas and English requirements, and they are usually the least well served.
Built for universities, colleges and higher education institutions. 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 university 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.
A page per course
Modules, duration, entry requirements and fees on the same page. Students search a subject, and a course page that omits the requirements sends them away to find them.
Entry requirements, stated plainly
Grades, equivalents and international qualifications. Ambiguity here costs applications from exactly the students who would have qualified.
Fees and funding
Home and international, plus scholarships and payment options. Cost is the second question after eligibility, always.
How to apply, step by step
Deadlines, documents, interviews. Applicants abandon at the point where the process becomes unclear.
Campus, accommodation and city
Where they will live, what it costs and what the place is like. This is what converts an interested student into a committed one.
International student information
Visas, English requirements, arrival support. Usually the weakest section on a university site and the most valuable to get right.
Three mistakes that cost university websites customers
These come up again and again in this trade, and all three are avoidable.
- Course pages that omit fees or entry requirements, forcing the student to hunt across the site.
- Prospectuses as huge PDFs instead of pages that can be searched and read on a phone.
- International information buried, when those applicants have the most questions and the highest value.
- Marketing language about transforming futures where a modules list should be.
- Deadlines left over from last year, which quietly signals nobody is maintaining the site.
- No indication of what the city and accommodation actually cost to live in.
Six university 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 university website
Describe the business
One or two sentences about your university 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.
University website questions
What belongs on a course page?
Modules, duration, entry requirements, fees and how to apply — all on one page. Splitting them across the site is the most common reason applicants drift away.
Should fees be prominent?
Yes, for both home and international students. It is the second question every applicant has and the one most often made difficult.
Are PDF prospectuses worth keeping?
As a supplement only. They are hard to read on a phone and largely invisible to search, so the web pages have to carry the real content.
How much should we write for international students?
More than most institutions do. Visa routes, English requirements and arrival support answer questions that otherwise become emails.
Does campus content matter?
It converts. Once a student believes they can get in and afford it, what decides them is whether they can picture living there.
How often should it change?
Entry requirements and deadlines every cycle without fail. Stale dates undermine trust in everything else on the site.
Can departments update their own pages?
Yes, and they should. Course content changes constantly and waiting on a central team is why university sites go out of date.
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