Effective Web Design for Higher Education Institutions

Effective website design for higher education is more than just an appealing look. For web design to work well, it needs to include a number of elements—all optimized for your specific target audience. From prospective students to faculty, your web design needs to speak directly to your user, giving them the information they need while establishing your credibility.

On this page, you’ll learn about effective web design for higher education, the essential elements, how the web design process works and what excellent web design can mean for your university or college. We’ll start by explaining what makes web design for college and university institutions effective. Keep reading if you want to learn more, and give us a call at 888-601-5359.

What constitutes effective web design for higher education?

While most companies will tell you website design for colleges is based on aesthetics, design is really only one small component to effective college websites. It’s what’s behind the design that makes your website work well.

Research is crucial to effective college and higher education website design. That means taking the time to understand your target audience, users, goals, competition, content, and intended brand. It also means reviewing your current site to see what’s working well and what can be improved.

Effective web design for higher education is achieved through the following crucial elements.

Clear organization

If yours is like most higher education institutions, you have a massive amount of information you need to convey. Organization is critical to effective website design. The structure of your site needs to be user-friendly and intuitive. Your site needs to get information to users quickly.

Professional copywriting

As a higher education institution, you also have a range of potential users, from prospective students still in high school to foreign students and Ph.D.-holders. The content on your site must be engaging, informative, and easy to digest while covering all topics. It needs to be consistent in style and tone.

Layout

Where buttons and fields are located is based more on science than design. You must combine industry best practices and an in-depth understanding of how the human eye travels across a webpage to design the most effective layout.

Brand

As the face of your college or university, your website design needs to establish your brand. It needs to position your higher education institution as an authority. Your design needs to instill a sense of trust while also setting you apart from other universities. Your brand should convey to potential and current students that your institution is the right choice for their career.

Forward compatibility

The most effective web designs for higher education institutions are not designed for today’s technology—they are designed for the future. That means anticipating where the current online trends are moving and designing accordingly. By keeping your university at the forefront of technology, you are positioning your brand as a being relative today and tomorrow.

Interactivity

When it comes to interactive elements, from links and forms to downloadable files and videos, they all need to work. A broken link or missing document does more than deter your users: it hurts your credibility. The code behind the design is just as important as the look and feel of your website.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Your website is only effective if it is seen. More importantly, it needs to reach your target audience: prospective students. Tried-and-true practices like SEO get your site seen by those who are looking for it.

Without SEO, it’ll be difficult for your audience to find your higher education website.

8 web design tips for universities

Your university’s website is a big deal — here’s how you can brand it properly.

1. Brand your website

The first thing to get right when it comes to academic web design is branding. Your website shouldn’t feel generic or bland. If you want students to attend your school, you need to evoke all the branding elements that make it unique.

If your university focuses on its age and tradition, use a design that conveys that feel — serif fonts, elegant shapes, and so on. If you want to seem fresh and modern, meanwhile, aim for a sleeker design.

Furthermore, make sure you integrate your school colors into the site. If your colors are orange and blue, don’t make your website red and white.

2. Show student life

Since university marketing is all about selling the experience of attending your school, why not do so by showing off pieces of the experience itself?

All it takes is a camera and two legs to make this work. You can pick a day when classes are in session and make your way around campus taking photos of students as they go about their lives. They can be eating lunch with friends, studying, or just walking to class.

You can also choose specific groups and organizations to document on your site. Mississippi State University (MSU) does this with their “State Spotlight” page.

State Spotlight highlights a different group or event on campus every few days, from a Theatre performance of “The Commedia Robin Hood” to a marching band rehearsal. These snapshots offer prospective students a look at what their daily lives could look like at MSU.

3. Optimize page speed

Did you know that 53% of users will abandon a page if it takes more than three seconds to load? That means that if you want to keep people on your website, you need to ensure that it has a fast page load speed.

Ideally, you want all the pages on your website to load within one or two seconds. Otherwise, all your visitors will hit the back button. So how do you accomplish that?

You can do a few different things to make your pages load faster, including caching your pages and compressing all the images you use. Using a tool like Google Analytics, you can then keep track of your load speeds to see if they’re where you want them to be.

4. Create infographics

Prospective students won’t just come to your website for pictures. Particularly as they start to get more serious about their decision, they’ll also come there for information.

When you have the opportunity, you can consider taking advantage of infographics to display information. Infographics arrange important information in a way that is both easily digestible and visually pleasing, as opposed to big blocks of text.

Auburn University offers just one example of this in action.

The homepage for Auburn’s College of Liberal Arts (CLA) presents users with an infographic entitled “CLA at a Glance.” It gives prospective students basic information about available majors, related organizations, and scholarship opportunities very quickly and efficiently.

5. Use responsive design

One of the best ways to put your website in front of users is to help it appear in relevant Google search results. When someone searches for something like “best universities in [your state],” you want pages from your site to appear in the results.

But even if you create a fantastic user experience on your site, it won’t matter if you don’t use responsive design. Google ranks sites based on their mobile format, so if yours is only optimized for desktop, it won’t rank.

For that reason, make sure your website is formatted to look good and function properly on both a computer and a phone.

6. Produce videos

Infographics are so attractive because of the way they use visual design elements, but what if those visuals were moving?

Of all the university website best practices, few are more engaging than the use of video. Especially when a video starts playing automatically, it can be hard to look away from it. That makes it a great tool for marketing your university.

You can incorporate videos throughout your website. You can accompany your pages for specific clubs and organizations with informative videos about each group, and you can place videos on your homepage to promote the university as a whole.

The second of those options is what Queens University of Charlotte opted to do.

When you visit their homepage, you’re immediately met with a full-page video promoting the university. Best of all, the video isn’t filled with fluff. It’s filled with shots of students engaging in various activities all across campus, providing a look into student life.

7. Display student testimonials

You can talk about your university all you want, but at the end of the day, the opinions your audience will trust the most are those of your current and former students. So why not incorporate some of those opinions into your academic website design?

When you get your students to talk about what makes your university great, why they love it there, and how it works, you create an incredibly valuable set of recommendations for your school. These testimonials can take any number of forms, from text blurbs to videos.

They don’t always have to be outright testimonials, either. Sometimes, just having a student sound genuinely happy or excited when talking about a certain topic can be a recommendation in and of itself.

Baylor University does this well on their “Why Baylor?” page.

The page provides a series of videos from Baylor alumni about how much they loved their time at Baylor, and about how their Baylor education helped them in their careers. These recommendations from young professionals do a lot to promote the school’s image.

8. Incorporate interactive elements

Last on our list of web design tips for universities is the value of interactive web elements. “Interactive” in the context of higher education website design essentially means that it changes in response to user behavior.

One example would be a pricing tool. You could have an interactive chart that allows prospective students to put in certain pieces of information — what scholarships they’ve received, what dorm they plan to live in, and so on — to see their estimated cost of attendance.

Not all interactive elements have to be tools, though. Interactive elements can be used for nothing more than visual effect. Something as simple as having images change appearance when you hover your mouse over them qualifies as interactive.

That’s exactly what Boston University did with their academic website design.

All the images on Boston’s homepage, big and small, light up and zoom in when you move your mouse over them. It’s a simple effect, but having the website respond to users — even in a way as subtle as that — is still enough to help keep them engaged.

Measuring the effectiveness of your design

How do you know if your new design is effective? Besides feedback from your users, metrics holds the answers. With Google Analytics, you can see exactly how your site is performing and who is visiting. From how long a visitor stays on a page to who is clicking the submit button on a form, you can get a big data picture of your website’s performance.

When it comes to effective web design, there is always room for improvement. That’s because technology—and how we use technology—is constantly evolving. The most successful web design for college and university institutions is updated continuously. These updates, from information to interactive elements, ensure your site remains relevant and useful to your target audience.

There are a number of benefits to an effective web design for your college or university:

Save time

With effective web design, you’ll be able to update your site quickly and efficiently. Moreover, you’ll have the information your visitors need—and where they expect it to be. That means instead of calling and speaking to your employees, your web visitors will have the information they want. This saves your staff time, so they can focus on the more pressing tasks.

Save money

By using your website to its fullest potential, you can save significant money on printing costs for traditional marketing materials. With downloads, videos, infographics and more, you can effectively reach your audience and convey your message cost-effectively.

Establish your credibility

Through effective web design for higher education, you can establish your professionalism. When your target audience visits your site, they will know you can play a critical role in reaching their career goals. From video testimonials and moving website copy to organized structure and a well-established brand, your college or university will make a positive impression.

Looking for help with your institution’s website design?

As a full-service Internet marketing company, WebFX knows what it takes to create a higher education website that not only looks great, but also reaches the most of potential students who are interested in furthering their education. With over 1,100 satisfied clients and plenty of designs to review in our portfolio, you can see for yourself how WebFX can help you get more from the web.

If you’re looking to improve your college or higher education institution’s web design, you don’t have to do it alone. We can put together a custom, no-obligation quote to redesign or improve your site that takes less time and money than you think. We’ll focus on improving your site while you focus on doing what you do best: giving students a brighter future.

Are you ready to reach more students and their families with your institution’s website? Contact WebFX today to discuss your goals for your site design. Together, we’ll achieve them—and more.

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