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How to build a University Website?

July 25th, 2023
How to build a University Website.

Introduction

A university website is essential for increasing student engagement, boosting your school's visibility, and attracting prospective students. The first step to building a successful university website is to know your target audience. This can either be prospective students, current students, faculty, alumni, or donors. 

Once you've identified them, it's time to get down to business! Here are some tips on how to plan a new website or redesign a site to meet everyone's needs. These tips will help you build a robust university website irrespective of whether you wish to hire a remote developer or build the website yourself.

Know Your Audience

Know Your Audience.

Know your audience. It's important to know your target audience and their main aim of visiting your website. If you don't know this, how can you ensure visitors to your website stick around for long and visit again.

Know how to reach them. Once you've identified who your visitors are, consider how to best design your website. It is important to understand how people interact with websites today. They're mobile-first! Hence make sure your content is optimized for viewing across various devices like phones, laptops and desktops.

Make it easy for people to find what they're looking for. Don't make your visitors search for things or click through multiple pages of content for what they want; instead, design your website to allow people to navigate it on their own easily. This will help them feel more comfortable and confident when using your site, which can lead to increased sales, leads and reach your objectives.

Designing a website map before developing your website is also crucial. The best way to achieve your goals is to hire a website development agency that works practically and strategically to make your website come alive with proper planning and execution.

Create a Strong Brand Identity

Create a Strong Brand Identity.

Your brand identity is the foundation of your website. It's what will give it personality and help you stand out from the crowd.

As you already know, who is your targeted audience? Now you must find how they want to be spoken to: are they young? Old? Male or female? What kind of language appeals most strongly to them? Once this has been decided, create a style guide so everyone working on the project knows how things should look and sound when posted online.

Next comes creating an overall visual identity. 

  • Which colours best represent your university? 

  • Which fonts will do it justice? 

  • What is a good logo design? 

  • What visual content best fits the university's profile?

This should all come together in one core brand identity document, informing every decision made throughout the development process - from logo design to copywriting and content creation.

As part of developing your brand identity, decide on a visual style as well. This will help ensure consistency across all platforms and make sure your content is presented in the best possible way.

Do you know: According to PRNewswire, Using the right colour is more important than using other elements. Nearly 40% of users prefer a good palette to other design elements in business websites.

Use the Right Colour Scheme

Use the Right Colour Scheme.

The colour scheme is important as well. It conveys a message, is an integral part of a theme, creates a mood and generates visual interest. The colours should be consistent with the institution's brand and easy for visitors to read and navigate through the site.

The following are some factors that you should consider first:

  • Purpose of the website. 

  • What does your university stand for in terms of culture, values and identity? 

  • What colours effectively represent these aspects on online platforms like social media channels or websites

  • Are certain groups within society less likely than others (elderly people/children) to be able to see certain hues clearly on screen due to their age-related eye conditions such as macular degeneration or cataracts, respectively?

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Choose the Right Fonts

Choose the Right Fonts.

Choosing the right fonts is an important part of creating a website. Using too many different fonts or decorative ones can make your site look unprofessional.

  • It is best to use serif fonts for body text and sans-serif fonts for headlines. That said, there are several other combinations as per your website design. 

  • A mix of different weights within each font family (using regular weight Garamond Italic with bold weight Garamond Extra Condensed Ultra-Light), gives readers more options when reading through long passages on screen or in print; this also adds visual interest by providing some variety in line length, character widths/spacing ratios between letters within words themselves rather than just at their ends where most people notice these things first.

Grab Attention with Great Imagery

Grab Attention with Great Imagery.

Images are an integral part of any website. A good collection of images can help you capture your audience's attention and keep them engaged. The images on your website should be relevant, appropriate, and clear so that visitors understand what they're looking at right away. You want to ensure that any images used are high quality and easy to read or understand.

Images are an important part of any website, especially if you're trying to sell something or promote a product or service. A high-quality image can capture your audience's attention and keep them engaged with your content. The images on your site should be relevant, appropriate, and clear so that visitors understand what they're looking at right away. Ensure the images are high quality and easy to understand.

Keep it Simple and User-Friendly.

Keep it Simple and User-Friendly.

The first thing you need to do is keep it simple and user-friendly. Your website needs to be easy for the uses to navigate so that they can find the information they need quickly. A good way of doing this is by using clear and concise language on your pages and ensuring there are not dead links.

You should also ensure that your website design is responsive. Considering we live in an era where almost everyone has a mobile device, a responsive website will automatically adjust itself depending on the type of devices it is accessed from. 

Incorporating other features like chatbot technology that allows users with questions about anything related to studying at university level coursework will help as well. The AI Chatbots do not require human intervention to deal with common user queries. 

You can choose a website framework like Laravel or choose to develop your website using core PHP or an open source. 

Top Trends of Laravel 10 - This is a good read to know more about Laravel development.

A Case Study: University of West Florida

A Case Study: University of West Florida.

We recently developed a university website for a well-known university in the USA. The university demanded many features, with a well-structured and framed website. With UWF, we made an impactful and interactive website that captured the attention of countless aspiring individuals.

As per the requirements, we had to work with many different elements, and it was a race against time. Our developers prioritize efficient coding and seamlessly integrated engaging features to create a welcoming and purposeful university website. The University of West Florida also benefited by joining hands with Acquaint Softtech.

The main features of this website: 

  • Welcoming, well-structured, and scalable development approach

  • Secure and easy navigation website

  • NAV bar linked with most useful pages

  • Quick link section for easy navigation approach

  • Search bar for easy navigation

  • Strategically placed CTAs

  • CMS development

  • Image and video gallery

  • Integrated online maps

If you are also interested in building a feature-rich university website, please get in touch. Hire a remote developer from us and jump-start your business.

Importance of University website

A great university website is essential for increasing student engagement, boosting your school's visibility, and helping to attract prospective students. A well-designed site will make it easy for potential applicants to get all the information they need about your institution in one place.

It's also an excellent way to stay in touch with alumni and parents who want updates on what's happening at their alma mater. And if you have many current students who are not based on campus--for example, those pursuing an online degree program--a robust website will allow them access to resources such as course syllabi and discussion boards that supplement what they're learning in class.

Conclusion

This post has given you some ideas on creating a great university website. Remember, there's no one-size-fits-all solution when designing websites, so feel free to experiment with different layouts and colours until you find something that works well for your audience. But if all else fails? It's time for an upgrade!

FAQ

What are the top key pages to add to a university website?

The university website consists of lots of pages due to the big size of the website. But the list is given below if we talk about the most important pages.

  • Home page

  • About us Page

  • Contact Us page

  • Academic page

  • Admission page

How much does it cost if you want to build a university website?

Making a university website is not easy and may take 3 months to 1 year depending on the features. The cost of the website also depends on several factors like the features to include, location of the development firm and much more.

But to give you a general idea, website development for universities starts from a basic website integrated with all crucial features ranging from $5000 and goes up to $50,000 depending on so many other factors. However, you can send us your requirements and we will get back to you with a detailed quote.

How much time does it take to develop a university website?

The time needed to build a university website varies based on its complexity. But as per our experience, time to build a university website varies from 3 to 10 months. The more the features the more complex it is, the longer it will take. 

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Mukesh Ram

Founder and CEO, Acquaint Softtech

I love to make a difference. Thus, I started Acquaint Softtech with the vision of making developers easily accessible and affordable to all. Me and my beloved team have been fulfilling this vision for over 15 years now and will continue to get even bigger and better.

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