Website design for colleges and universities: a site that families, assessors and AI systems can all check
A college website is read by four kinds of people who want different things: an applicant and a parent comparing programmes, a student looking for a notice, an assessor looking for a record, and now an AI system summarising all of it for someone else. Most institutional sites are built for the first reader's first impression and leave the other three to a folder of PDFs.
By Rish Sadh, founderUpdated
Short answer
Designing a website for a college or university means organising it around the decisions its readers make, not around the institution's departments. Each programme gets one page that opens with the same fixed facts. Outcome figures are given per programme and per year, with the office that confirmed them. Accreditation and disclosure records are published as readable pages, not scanned images, and notices are dated and kept. A site built this way is easier to use, easier to audit and easier for a machine to quote correctly.
Who is actually reading an institutional website?
The applicant wants to know whether a programme is right, what it costs and when to apply. A parent wants the same facts plus evidence that the institution is what it says it is. An enrolled student arrives for one thing, usually a dated notice, and leaves if it takes more than two clicks. An assessor or regulator arrives with a list of records to confirm.
The fourth reader is new. Some of those first two readers now ask an AI system to compare colleges before they open a single site. That system reads the pages the institution published and repeats what it can find stated plainly. Where a fee, a date or an outcome figure lives only inside a PDF or an image, it cannot be quoted, and the answer is built from somewhere else.
What should a programme page carry?
The same rows, in the same order, on every programme: level and award, duration, eligibility, fees with the year they apply to, intake and closing dates, how the programme is assessed, what graduates went on to do, and a named person or office to contact. A reader who has seen one programme page knows where to look on the next, and a comparison between two programmes becomes a matter of reading across.
Anything not yet confirmed says so on the page. An empty or estimated fee is worse than an honest "to be confirmed before the cycle opens", because the first gets quoted and the second gets checked.
Outcomes follow the same discipline. Give them per programme, per graduating year, as a median, and name the office that holds the figure. A single institution-wide percentage hides the programmes that place poorly, which is precisely what a careful parent is trying to find out.
A campus photograph persuades a visitor once. A dated record is what an assessor, a parent and an AI system will all come back to.
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Ahrefs, 75,000 brandsWhich pages does nobody design, and everybody needs?
Accreditation and quality records, the public disclosure an institution is required to make, the grievance route, the safeguarding and anti-harassment policies, the accessibility statement and the notices archive. These are usually the oldest pages on the site, written once and never revisited, with documents attached as scans.
They are also the pages a regulator, a journalist or a worried parent opens when something has gone wrong. Publishing each as a plain page with its date, its owner and the documents attached as text-readable files costs little. It is the cheapest trust the institution can buy, and it is the part of the site that decides how the rest is read.
Accessibility belongs here too, as part of the brief rather than a late audit. Aim for WCAG 2.2 level AA, test with a keyboard and a screen reader, and assume the first visit is on a mid-range phone over a poor connection. A college that serves every kind of student has to be readable by every kind of student.
What does this look like built?
Reidify built Thornmere, an invented autonomous college, to put the approach in one place: eleven programmes filtered in one step, a programme page that opens with the fixed facts, a placements report that follows six stated rules, and an accreditation hub holding the records, the grievance route and the accessibility statement. It is a concept, so every figure on it is labelled illustrative and no form on it sends anything.
It is a worked example of the structure, not a template to copy. A real institution brings its own records, its own regulator and its own constraints, and the first job is to find out what it is obliged to publish and what it would be proud to.
Common questions
What pages does a college or university website need?
A page for each programme that opens with the same fixed facts, an admissions page with the dates and the application route, fees published against the year they apply to, an outcomes page, an accreditation and disclosure page, a grievance route, an accessibility statement and a dated notices archive. Everything else is secondary to those.
Should a college publish placement figures?
If it publishes any, the figures should be given per programme and per graduating year, as a median rather than an average, with the office that confirmed each one named. A row with no reliable figure should say so instead of carrying an estimate. A single college-wide percentage is easy to read and hard to trust.
Does a college website have to be accessible?
It should be, first as a matter of service: applicants, students and parents use assistive technology and low-bandwidth phones. A sensible target is WCAG 2.2 level AA, tested by keyboard and with a screen reader. The legal duties differ by country and by institution type, so check the rules that apply to yours.
Can Reidify design a college website?
Yes. Reidify designs and builds institutional websites on the same terms as its other work: structure first, then design. Thornmere, linked below, is an invented college built as a worked example of the approach. It is a concept, not a client project, and every figure on it is labelled illustrative.
What AI-first design means
The definition this use case applies to an institution.
Thornmere, an institutional website concept
An invented college built as a worked example of this structure.
What should a college put on its website
The page-by-page checklist behind this use case.
AI-first website for coaching institutes
The same specialisation problem for a smaller kind of institution.
Find out what your institution's site tells a family, an assessor and an AI system.