A university website is one of the hardest digital products to design well. A college website is not far behind. Both have to serve six or seven distinct audiences with conflicting needs, comply with provincial accessibility law and federal language law, and present an institution that may have 80 academic units each with their own opinions about how they should be presented online.
We have built academic websites for Carleton University's EERL and Georgian College, and consulted on a few more. This post is the version of the conversation we wish we could have at the start of every project.
What makes a university or college website different
Three structural differences from any other website you might design.
First, the audience problem is harder than anywhere else. Your homepage has to serve prospective undergraduate students, prospective graduate students, current students, faculty, staff, alumni, donors, researchers, parents of prospective students, journalists, and the general public. Each has different goals and different vocabulary.
Second, the content owners are everywhere. A typical Canadian university has 200 to 600 people with the ability to edit content on the website. Most are faculty members who do this six times a year and forget how between sessions. Quality control is a real ongoing problem.
Third, the site is never finished. Programs launch and change every term. Faculty come and go. Research centres open and close. The website is a permanently in flight project.
A university website best practice that works for a 20 person non-profit will not work for an institution of this complexity. Different rules apply.
The homepage is not the front door
The number one mistake we see in Canadian university and college website redesigns. Treating the homepage like a marketing brochure.
Most homepages get less traffic than people assume. The majority of users arrive on deep pages from Google searches. They search for "Carleton mechanical engineering admission requirements" and land on the program page directly. The homepage is often skipped entirely.
What this means for your university website best practices. Spend less time worrying about homepage hero rotation and more time making sure every program page is a self contained, fully signposted landing experience. Each program page needs its own clear next steps, its own admission information, its own faculty showcase, and its own way back to related programs.
Audience segmentation that works
The standard university homepage has six big buttons at the top. Future Students. Current Students. Faculty and Staff. Alumni. Research. Visit. Members of the public never know which one to click.
The audience model that works better is task based, not audience based.
Apply (covers prospective students)
Learn (covers current students)
Research (covers researchers, prospective grad students, partners)
Connect (covers alumni, donors, community)
About (covers the public, journalists, government)
Members of the public click "About". Prospective students click "Apply". Current students bookmark the student portal and never see the public website. Faculty go directly to internal tools through SSO.
This audience model also makes your AODA compliance easier because screen reader users have fewer ambiguous navigation choices to interpret.
AODA compliance for post secondary institutions
Universities and colleges in Ontario are designated public sector organisations under AODA. The accessibility standards apply in full. WCAG 2.1 AA conformance is the baseline. New content has to comply. Existing content has to be remediated on a documented schedule.
Where Canadian university websites typically fall short.
PDF files used for course syllabi, application packages, and program guides are often not tagged for accessibility. A 60 page program brochure exported from InDesign without tags is unusable on a screen reader.
Video content from convocation, lectures, and admissions tours often lacks captions and transcripts. Auto generated YouTube captions are not sufficient for AODA compliance.
Embedded third party tools (course catalogues, application portals, virtual tour platforms) often fail accessibility audits even when the main site passes.
Mathematical and scientific notation in course descriptions is often rendered as images. MathML or properly tagged equations make this content accessible. Image based equations do not.
We recommend an annual third party accessibility audit for any post secondary institution. The internal team will not catch everything, and AODA fines for designated public sector organisations are not theoretical.
Bilingual considerations
If you are a federally funded university or college, or you serve a francophone community, OLA compliance applies. Even if you are not formally bilingual, individual programs may be required to offer French language services depending on funding sources.
For bilingual academic websites, the URL structure should mirror the English structure exactly. yoursite.ca/programs/engineering and yoursite.ca/fr/programmes/genie. Both versions need their own admission requirements, faculty profiles, and contact information. A French homepage with English deep pages is not a bilingual website.
Quebec institutions have additional obligations under Bill 96. If you serve students in Quebec, the French version must be the primary version and must meet OQLF standards. This is more complex than simply translating the English site.
Research centre and lab micro sites
Most Canadian universities have 40 to 200 research centres, institutes, and labs. Each one wants its own visual identity, its own publication list, its own director profile, and its own grant funding.
The two failure modes we see.
The institutional approach. Every research centre has to use the same template, the same colours, the same navigation. Centres feel suffocated. Many start running shadow websites on personal hosting. The institution loses control of brand consistency anyway.
The wild west approach. Every research centre runs its own website on its own hosting with its own designer. Brand consistency vanishes. Accessibility compliance vanishes. Half the centre sites are broken six months after the post doc who built them leaves.
The model that works is a centre template system. Centres get a defined set of design tokens (colours, typography, layout patterns) that allow customisation within constraints. They live on a subdomain or subdirectory of the main institutional domain. They share an authentication system and an accessibility audit pipeline. Each centre director has editorial control within the template.
We built the Carleton University EERL website on this model. The lab has its own visual identity within the broader Carleton system, its own research outputs, and full editorial control over its content. It still benefits from the institutional infrastructure for hosting, accessibility, and analytics.
What goes wrong
Patterns we see in Canadian university and college website projects that struggle.
Discovery never ends. Six months of stakeholder interviews. Twelve months of audience research. The project enters design phase the next year with the audiences having shifted.
Trying to redesign the entire institution at once. Every program page, every research centre, every faculty profile updated in one launch. Schedule slips by 18 months. Money runs out. Half the site launches and half remains on the old CMS.
Picking a CMS that none of the content authors can use. Custom enterprise CMS implementations with steep learning curves end up edited by three people in central communications, while the rest of the institution gives up and emails PDFs.
No content governance. The new site launches with brilliant content architecture. Three years later it is the same swamp it was before because nobody owns content quality across the institution.
Realistic budget
For a Canadian university or college website project done properly.
Single faculty or department site: $15,000 to $45,000.
Research centre or institute site (within a larger institutional ecosystem): $20,000 to $60,000.
Full institutional website redesign for a small college: $200,000 to $500,000.
Full institutional website redesign for a research university: $800,000 to $3 million plus.
These figures cover discovery, design, content, build, and basic integrations. They do not include CMS licensing, ongoing content work, video production, or the inevitable scope expansion that happens during institutional projects.
