Higher education websites often need to target a number of distinct audiences including prospective students, current students (usually the most important stakeholders), alumni, parents, teachers, and staff.

Additionally, it’s often important to maintain consistency in branding, often across departments or even colleges within a university system.

Goals

While tactics like personalization can help target content to a school’s audiences while retaining brand consistency, the best projects start with excellent design focused on site goals. For a university or college, these might include:

• Increasing the number and quality of applicants
• Increasing donations
• Communicating information about campus life to parents and students
• Increasing the adoption of student tools, such as email, calendaring, and collaboration applications.

The over-arching goal should be to make the experience of doing business with the college as simple and intuitive as possible.

Techniques

Given the tremendous amount of content (and often, hundreds or thousands of pages) required to support a college’s many goals, it’s critical that you get design right. This means:

• Useful content: While not generally considered part of the design process, all successful websites begin with a content strategy. Make sure you’ve outlined who the important audiences are, and what they are coming to your site for. Have it. This includes sourcing and reusing community and user-generated content, and employing automation and personalization to serve the most relevant information to visitors.
• Calls to action: Conspicuous call to action buttons highlighting the important goals for visitors (hint: Apply) are becoming a mainstay of effective, modern web design.
• Simple, logical navigation: Make it obvious. Along with clear calls to action, intuitive navigation helps your visitors quickly find what they’re looking for.

In general, focus on usability and make doing business with the college as easy as possible.

Here are a few websites we found serve as examples of the best web design out there for universities and colleges.

Aurora Community College

Aurora Community College features a Web 2.0 aesthetic, useful quicklinks, and a central promotion box to highlight important content.

Nebraska Wesleyan University

This homepage features a beautiful transparent header with a split screen showing highlighted stories next to quicklinks. The horizontal navigation is simple and makes great use of white space for an elegant look.

Boston University

Boston University, one of the largest private schools in the United States, recently redesigned their homepage. A massive image links to a featured article and gives the site a great deal of visual interest, while four columns below feature important content. The horizontal navigation is so obvious and simple its perfect.

Richland College

The light design makes use of obvious nav elements, featured content lists and a large promo box, all centered around a massive “Apply Now” button.

Tufts University

A non-traditional design showcases interesting events and news at Tufts, with a small but excellent set of navigation links top left. We love the “toolkit,” and area at the top right that presents links to tools students need on a regular basis in one convenient place, as well Tufts’ social network links. Also, a great example of how a great color scheme can give a site tons of personality.

University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences

Someone has taken a page from the Obama Administration school of web design, using an elegant but immaculate layout and sophisticated typefaces. The top half of the site rotates promoted stories and features (complete with pretty images and a beautiful transparency layer), leaving tons of space for news and events below.

Hampshire College

Another decidedly non-traditional design, the Hampshire College homepage is more akin to a magazine layout. Huge images, nice uncluttered nav with direct, descriptive titles makes it easy to find what you're looking for. Square promotion boxes overlaid over the rotating image give it depth. A useful dropdown allows access to deeper pages without adding complexity to the main navigation.

Virginia Tech

Virginia Tech’s Percussion-powered site manages to present a tremendous amount of information without clutter – great use of images and a modular layout that includes multiple navigation bars, a promotion slider, a world location, and student links.