Turning a catch-all into an enrollment engine.
A fast-growing online university had a homepage that spoke to no one and a site that answered to everyone. We rebuilt it around the audience it most needed to win: the prospective student deciding, in a browser tab, whether this place was for them.
- Role
- Experience Lead
- Engagement
- Brand & website redesign
- Disciplines
- Brand · IA · Content Strategy · Design System
- Timeline
- 2022–2023
The challenge
The university had grown many times over in a decade, most of that growth online and most of it faster than the website could keep up with. What had once been a marketing site had quietly become an internal filing cabinet: thousands of pages, added one department at a time, each speaking to a colleague rather than a customer. Stakeholders said it plainly in discovery. The site had “multiple personalities, and not one of them stands out.”
The cost landed squarely on the audience the university most needed to grow: prospective students, most of them online, many who had never heard the name before and arrived already asking whether it was legitimate. They met a homepage thin on story and a maze of links, sitting on top of a crawl of roughly eight thousand URLs with no shared idea of who any of them were for. Behind the scenes the problem compounded: a content-authoring experience so cumbersome that staff had stopped updating their own pages, so the catch-all only grew.
The approach
A website that answers to everyone is really a website with no one in charge of it. Before touching the sitemap, the work was to decide what the site was for, then let that single decision reorganize everything downstream: the navigation, the page types, and who was trusted to touch them.
Decide who the site is for
We tested a student-first brand platform with the people who would have to stand behind it: a survey of roughly two hundred stakeholders across academics, admissions, leadership, and marketing. A plain, transparent, student-forward promise beat the cleverer alternatives by a wide margin; the we-are-different-from-other-schools framing that stakeholders read as try-hard lost decisively. That platform became the filter for every later decision. For any page, one question: does this serve a prospective student, or an internal habit?
Navigate by journey, not by org chart
We rebuilt the structure around the paths real audiences take, program exploration first, with multiple routes and cross-links wherever a mental model split (“enrollment” meant admissions to a prospect and course registration to a current student, so both paths stayed). Then we proved it before designing a pixel: a tree test of 337 community members across fifteen finding tasks returned 80% task success, the top of the band researchers call an effective tree. The few failures were specific and cheap to fix, a cost calculator buried a level too deep, an in-house title for the role everyone else calls an academic advisor, and we fixed them in the model rather than in production.
Give the site back to the people who run it
The redesign shipped as a kit, not a stack of pages: a small library of page types and modules, powered by a taxonomy so that tagging a story once fed it automatically into every relevant listing across the site. Non-technical authors got an interface built for them, with governance and training so the structure would hold after launch. And the content itself was cut hard, from roughly 980 core pages to about 440, external-audience-first, so that what remained could actually be maintained.
“We’ve been flying under the radar for too long. We need to tell our story and let people know how good we are.”
What changed
The site stopped answering to the org chart and started answering to its audiences. A homepage that had tried to say everything now led with a clear promise and a path into the programs that drive enrollment. Navigation followed how prospects actually think, not how the university is departmentally arranged, and the labels matched the words people use for themselves.
Underneath, the redesign left behind a system that resists re-sprawl: a taxonomy-driven component set, a defined job for every page type, and authors equipped to keep it current. The failure mode that had produced the catch-all in the first place, content added faster than anyone could govern it, finally had both an owner and a shape.
The outcome
The site launched as a marketing tool again, aimed at the audiences the university needed to grow, and the number that matters most to enrollment moved with it.
- +15%
- Applications in the year after launch
- 80%
- Task success in navigation testing, before a page was designed
- −55%
- Legacy core pages retired in the content cleanse
What I’d carry forward
- 01
Decide who the site is for before you redraw a single box. On a university site it is the brand platform, not the org chart, that has the authority to reorganize everything else.
- 02
Test the structure before you design it. A tree test with 300-plus real users caught the labels and gaps that would otherwise have shipped as a year of support tickets.
- 03
Ship the system that keeps content alive. A taxonomy, a component kit, and real training are what stop a marketing site from sliding back into a filing cabinet.
Have a system that has outgrown its structure?
This is the kind of problem I like best. Tell me where it stands and I’ll tell you how I’d approach it.