Fifteen years of building large-scale websites for colleges and universities, and the most important lessons aren’t the ones you’d expect. They’re not about responsive design or CMS platforms or SEO best practices. They’re about people, process, and the gap between what makes a website “impressive” and what makes it actually “work”.
Here are the five most surprising lessons I’ve learned along the way as I, and the industry, have matured over the past 15 years.
Surprise #1: A Beautiful Website Design Doesn't Guarantee Success
I’m going to say something that might sound strange coming from someone who builds websites: beautiful design is not what makes a website successful.
Design matters. First impressions matter. A dated, clunky site absolutely undermines your credibility. But over fifteen years, I’ve watched some of our most visually stunning sites plateau, while sites that were less flashy became genuine institutional workhorses that performed for years.
The difference wasn’t aesthetics. It was everything underneath.
The sites that thrived had clear student journeys. They had content governance figured out, who owns what, who the intended audience is, and what gets updated, and when. They had realistic expectations about photography and authentic storytelling: real students, real experiences, and real outcomes.
That last part matters more than most institutions realize. Prospective students connect with authenticity. The sites that resonate most deeply are full of genuine proof points: real student quotes that sound like actual humans talking, specific outcomes with numbers attached, and faculty who come across as people rather than credentials.
The sites that didn’t have the longevity? Often they were the ones where everyone (understandably) fell in love with the homepage design in the first presentation. It’s exciting to see your institution looking its best. But that excitement sometimes meant the less glamorous work got less attention. Content strategy felt like it could wait. Governance felt politically complicated. And nobody was responsible for gathering authentic stories.
If you’re evaluating agencies primarily on whose design comps look prettiest, you might be optimizing for the wrong thing. The design will matters but the strategy, governance, authentic storytelling, and infrastructure will matter just as much, if not more for the next five to seven years.
A beautiful site with strong foundations can serve your institution for years. That’s the goal worth planning for.
Surprise #2: Stakeholder Alignment Is an Ongoing Practice
The institutions that get the most value from their websites treat alignment as an ongoing practice, not a one-time project phase. They’re constantly teaching, listening, and reinforcing the site’s purpose, especially as new people join the institution.
This is particularly important in higher education, where change is constant. New faculty arrive, administrative assistants transition, department chairs rotate, new VPs come in with fresh ideas from their previous institution. And every single one of these people cares about students and wants to help.
That’s actually the challenge: everyone’s trying to do good work, but without shared understanding of the site’s purpose and principles, well-intentioned individual decisions can add up to collective confusion. Someone adds a page because “students need to know this”—and they’re right, students do need to know it, but now it lives in a place students can’t find. Another person uploads a PDF because the page editing process feels unclear. A faculty member creates a resource site on a different platform because they genuinely want to serve their students better.
None of these people are doing anything wrong. They’re all trying to help organically.
The institutions that avoid this pattern do a few things differently. They build website orientation into onboarding for new employees—not just “here’s how to log in” but “here’s why the site is structured this way, and here’s how your role fits in.” They hold regular check-ins with content owners, not to police them but to hear what’s working and what’s not. They treat “what should go on the website” as an ongoing conversation, not a decision that was made three years ago.
One client created a simple one-page “Website Purpose” document that they share with every new hire who might touch the site. It takes five minutes to read. It’s made everyone’s life easier.
Alignment isn’t a phase. It’s a practice, and when it works, it makes everyone’s job better.
Surprise #3: Content Strategy Takes Three Times Longer Than You Think
When a web project includes content development, most institutions assume it’s the straightforward part. Everyone knows how to write. We’ve been doing it since elementary school, right?
It turns out, it’s almost always the most complex part, and recognizing that upfront is actually freeing.
Over fifteen years, I’ve seen more projects extended by content than by any other factor. More than design revisions. More than CMS complexity. More than stakeholder discussions about homepage real estate. Content is where the real work lives.
The challenge isn’t that people can’t write. The challenge is that writing for the web, writing that actually works for your users, is a fundamentally different skill than writing an academic paper, a brochure, or an email. It requires understanding how people actually read online (they scan before they read). It requires making hard choices about what to prioritize (that beautiful paragraph about your founding mission might need to move). It requires writing for multiple audiences simultaneously while making each one feel like the page was written just for them.
Some of most effective content isn’t written by marketers at all. It’s captured from real people. The nursing student who can articulate exactly why she chose your program over three others. The alum who can speak specifically about how their degree opened doors. Gathering these authentic voices, coordinating permissions, editing them while preserving the humanity—this takes real time and real coordination.
Most institutions underestimate content timelines by a factor of three. And if you’re hoping to simply migrate the existing content, it is important to have a real conversation about what that involves and how it may limit what the redesign can really be.
The single most valuable thing you can do before a web project kicks off is a content audit. Not necessarily a full inventory of every page (though that helps), but an honest assessment: What content do we actually have? What shape is it in? Who currently owns it? Do we have authentic student and faculty voices, or mostly marketing copy? And the question that creates the most freedom—how much can we simplify?
I’ve worked with institutions that reduced their page count by 60% during a redesign. Not because they were deleting important information, but because they discovered they had seventeen pages saying essentially the same thing, orphan pages no one had visited in years, and entire sections that existed because someone needed them in 2015. Letting go of that content wasn’t loss—it was liberation.
Simplify before you create. Your future self will thank you.
Surprise #4: Site Search Usage Is Not a Site Failure
I used to take it personally when users bypassed our carefully crafted navigation and went straight to the search bar. We’d spent weeks on those menu labels. We’d debated the information architecture. We’d tested it. And then analytics would show that a huge percentage of visitors just… searched.
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize: some people just prefer search. They like the immediacy. They know what they want, and they don’t want to click through three levels of menus to get there. It’s not a judgment on your navigation, it’s just how they operate. And fighting that instinct is a losing battle.
Once I accepted this, it changed how we approach projects.
Your content needs to be findable through search, not just through navigation. That means thinking about the words actual humans type when they’re looking for something—which aren’t always the words you use internally. “Tuition” versus “cost of attendance.” “Dorms” versus “residential life.” “Apply” versus “admissions requirements.” If your content doesn’t include the terms people actually search, they won’t find it, no matter how logical your menu structure is.
Your internal search needs to be well-tuned. This is often an afterthought, but it shouldn’t be. A search that returns irrelevant results, or buries the right answer on page three, or surfaces PDFs from 2017 that’s a problem you can fix. Invest in configuring search results, weighting important pages, and testing what comes up for common queries.
And you need to make peace with the fact that those navigation labels you agonized over? Some users will never see them. That’s not failure. That’s just… users being users.
The deeper lesson here is one that applies across all of this work: give users what they want, in the way they want it. Not everyone will experience your site the same way. Some will browse. Some will search. Some will land directly on a program page from Google and never see your homepage at all. The best sites work for all of them.
Surprise #5: Website Maintenance Only Happens Regularly If It's Easy(ish)
Websites start aging the day they launch.
The world does not sit still, and things always need updating.
Sometimes six months after launch, pages aren’t updated as often as intended, and news sections slow down due to heavy, unoptimized media; faculty listings include people who’ve moved on.
It’s usually the predictable result of maintenance being more challenging or more time-consuming than anyone has bandwidth for. And everyone involved is already stretched thin with their actual job responsibilities.
I’ve seen CMS platforms so feature-rich that making a simple text edit isn’t intuitive. Sites where the content owners never quite got the training they needed, so they hesitate to touch anything. Or workflows so complex that content updates get bottlenecked waiting for approval.
The institutions that maintain their sites well have a few things in common. Their CMS matches their team’s actual capacity, not the most powerful option, but the one people will actually use confidently. They have clear, simple documentation for common tasks. They schedule regular maintenance time rather than treating it as “when we get to it.” And they build in rhythms for refreshing content, new student quotes each semester, updated outcome statistics annually, fresh photography on a predictable cycle.
Build for reality. Reality includes the person who’ll be updating this site with a full plate of other responsibilities, trying to remember the training from two years ago, wanting to do good work but needing the system to meet them halfway.
Make it easy, and it’ll actually happen.
The Biggest Surprise: Your Website Isn't a Project, It's a Practice
The flashy bits are genuinely fun. There’s nothing quite like a design reveal, seeing your institution transformed, imagining how prospective students will experience it, feeling like you’re finally going to have a website that matches the quality of what you actually offer. That excitement is real, and it matters. It’s one of my favorite parts of this work.
And after months of stakeholder meetings, content coordination, and CMS training, everyone naturally wants to get back to their regular responsibilities. The website project was supposed to be a focused effort—a big push, then done. Check the box. Return to normal.
But websites aren’t one-time projects. They’re living systems. And living things thrive when they’re tended regularly.
The institutions that understand this, that treat launch as the beginning of a new chapter rather than the end of a story, are the ones still proud of their sites five years later. They’re the ones whose sites keep working hard for them, keep evolving with their needs, keep connecting with prospective students in meaningful ways.
That’s the opportunity these five lessons point toward: not just a website that launches well, but a website that keeps serving your institution for years to come. It takes more intention upfront. It takes ongoing care. And it’s absolutely worth it.
Beth Carron is a Partner and the Director if Higher Education Services at iFactory/RDW Group. She always loves to chat all things strategy, content, higher ed, AI and digital. You can connect with her at hello@ifactory.com.
