Good website design isn’t just about aesthetics. If you want your school to present its most appealing public face, you need more than a glossy brochure and a clean quadrangle. A professional, polished university website design for public consumption can increase student interest and engagement.
Demonstrate Your Willingness to Step Into the Modern Era
Today’s students want to attend schools whose websites don’t give their parents ’90s flashbacks.
Design Shack ranked a series of school website designs, from excellent to poorly-executed, and some of the worst offenders on the list come straight from a late-twentieth-century designer’s toolbox. They feature unappealing background and font color choices, inefficient use of white space, and distracting animations.
If you’re hoping to attract today’s students to your school, you need a website that shows you’re willing to step into modern times. Students want to attend schools that embrace change and progress, but if your website is mired in a prior decade, you’ll likely turn them off.
Provide Easy Navigation and Access
Today’s students are busy. They don’t spend much time exploring websites that fail to capture their interest, which is why you need an updated school website design that allows prospective students to find what they need at the click of a button. Simple, intuitive navigation is one of the most important elements.
A skilled website designer can create a site that lures in students and keeps them interested in your content. You don’t want prospective students to have to hunt for information. Their rapidly shrinking attention spans leave them vulnerable to distractions, so don’t miss out on a valuable opportunity.
Integrate Your Higher Education Marketing Efforts
Your school’s website shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. Integrate it with the rest of your marketing strategy.
Ideally, your school website design should reflect your entire online presence, from your listings on aggregate sites to your social media platforms. If you start with a great design, you can integrate it into the rest of your online presence so your brand becomes more visible and recognizable.
When you work with an experienced designer, you can create a full brand package. While that sounds like marketing speak, it’s actually an intuitive and effective way to approach higher education marketing, especially if you’re experiencing lackluster interest from your website.
Marry Form With Function
While it might sometimes seem like modern web design deals more with form than with function, the two must actually work together. A beautiful design doesn’t benefit your school if students can’t find what they need, and a poor design will turn students away before they can delve into the site’s meat.
Improving your site’s aesthetic design will engage student interest and lead them further into the site. Excellent navigation and content layouts will keep them engaged for longer periods of time.
If your school website design doesn’t seem beautiful or functional enough, it’s time to update it and start generating positive results for your school. Download our website RFP template to get better estimates and proposals for the job.
