What makes a successful university website?
By Ruth KentÂ
Contra know a thing or two about creating successful university and college websites. We’ve helped many educational institutions over the years and yes, we’re pretty well versed in what makes a university website a success.
So, where to start?
How’s about with ‘know thy audience’?
Prospective students will of course be top of any university website audience list. However, that’s not the whole story - there are also current students, international visitors, potential investors, alumni, staff, people wishing to find out about or use the university’s facilities, and so on. It’s vital that you create user journeys that satisfy each group. The only way to do that is to fully understand their respective needs and goals. So - do your user research before you do anything else.
But let’s stay with the prospective student for now - that primary audience member type universities (and sometimes the colleges or departments with a university) compete for.
A recent ‘Which? University’ http://university.which.co.uk/ survey found that the most important topics prospective students want to know about are course content (77%), academic reputation (57%), distance from home (57%) and quality of academic facilities (57%).  So - therein lie some clues as to how best to serve up information and other content on your site.
When Contra came up with a new design for the Ravensbourne site, we took notice of what users wanted most and our design allowed the cutting edge, digitally focused college to showcase work, event or sub-brand sections of the site (through the use of full-screen video or photographic backgrounds). This flexibility allowed areas of the site to be distinct, whilst retaining a unified feel.
Our homepage design focused on the top three user requirements, but Ravensbourne could also alter these options and the background to suit different periods of the year, such as clearing and enrolment. And our approach worked; Ravensbourne hurtled up the UK university website rankings by 245 places, after launch.
Moving on, something that many prospective students find invaluable is anecdotally-based information - from students themselves, which perhaps explains the popularity of community sites such as The Student Room - http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/.
Our advice here is to give prospective students a direct line through to your current student community. Weave social streams or blogs through your site, or follow the example of universities such as Cambridge, with their ‘Alternative Prospectus’ site: http://www.applytocambridge.com/, which opens with ‘Everything you are about to read has been written by current students at the University...’
A common area of weakness for many universities is down to the fact that they actually operate as an amalgam of departments, faculties, schools or colleges. Reflecting a coherent brand strategy that simultaneously allows room for the individual ‘brand personality’ of any given department within a university can be incredibly hard to get right. Our advice would be to establish brand guidelines that cover pan-university commonalities/mandatories, but that also allow each department room to ‘breathe’, from a branding perspective. There are actually many possible approaches here - and we’d strongly advise a bespoke approach, based upon the specific make-up of the institution in hand. As an example though, a university could elect to go for a site-wide/common core structure and main features, but with departments and faculties each customising their own ‘content modules’ within this framework.
The recipe for a successful university website is definitely more complex and far-reaching than we have so far highlighted, but this is a blog post and as such, brevity is required! So for now, all we’ll say is that if you are responsible in some way for the success of an educational institution's website and would like to talk your own requirements, challenges or aspirations through with an expert, get in touch with Contra!Â
