A university site is not a website, it is hundreds of sites maintained by hundreds of people with different skills and no shared manager. Every redesign begins by consolidating that sprawl and, without a governance change, the sprawl returns within a few years. The design is the visible part and rarely the problem being solved.
The audience that pays for the site is prospective students
Prospective students and their families are the commercial audience, and they want programmes, cost, entry requirements, deadlines and what life there is like, mostly on a phone. Current students and staff need services and information. Serving both from one undifferentiated structure is how these sites become unusable for the audience that matters most.
Governance is the deliverable
Who may publish, which templates they must use, what happens to a page nobody has touched in years, and who owns each section. Without those decisions the site regrows its sprawl, because the underlying cause is distributed publishing with no lifecycle. The most valuable output of a redesign is usually the publishing policy.
Accessibility is a legal obligation
Public institutions are required to make web content accessible, with federal rules referencing a recognised technical standard and setting compliance timelines. At the scale of a university this is a substantial programme covering documents and media as well as pages, and it has to be built into templates and training rather than remediated page by page.
Content lifecycle beats content migration
Most of what exists should not move. Establish ownership and a review date for everything kept, archive the rest, and make the review a recurring obligation. Migrating everything because nobody wants to decide is how the new site launches already carrying the old one's problem.
Questions people ask about university website design
How many editors should a university site have?
Fewer than it has, with a clear distinction between people who publish within templates and people who can change structure. The number matters less than whether each has an owner and a review obligation.
Should departments have separate sites?
Within one system and one template set wherever possible. Genuinely separate platforms are where accessibility and security obligations are most often missed, because nobody central knows they exist.
What about the course catalogue?
It is usually the most visited and most neglected area, held in a separate system. Getting programme information accurate, current and readable on a phone is often worth more than the redesign around it.
How long should a university redesign take?
A year or more for a large institution, and the consolidation and governance work dominates. Projects scoped only as design and build almost always overrun on content.