Higher education — a focused practice
We help higher-education teams simplify complex websites, improve accessibility and make institutional knowledge easier to find — whether a visitor starts with Google, an AI assistant or your homepage.
No. 01The environment
Nobody planned the whole. Decades of templates, owners and reorganizations accumulate into an ecosystem that is hard to use, hard to maintain and hard to find things in. None of it is anyone's fault; all of it is fixable.
a
Hundreds of publishers, dozens of sub-sites — and no single owner of the visitor's experience.
b
Visitors arrive with questions; sites answer with departments.
c
Every template generation leaves a layer behind — and the legal and ethical stakes keep rising.
d
Prospective students now arrive through search and AI assistants that read structure, not brochures.
No. 02Typical engagements
Senior-led and scoped, with ranges stated up front so the first conversation starts honest. Every engagement is shaped to the institution — these are starting points, not packages.
01
A short engagement to clarify the problem, align stakeholders, examine the current experience and define a feasible path forward.
Stakeholder discovery, analytics and UX research, accessibility assessment, content and IA review, technology assessment, and a sequenced roadmap.
2–5 weeks
$15–30k
02
A focused redesign — strategy through accessible build, migration and launch.
Information architecture, UX, visual system, accessible front-end, CMS architecture and integration, migration planning, analytics, and launch.
8–16+ weeks
$40–100k+
03
For teams improving the ecosystem they have, rather than rebuilding everything.
WCAG 2.2 remediation, semantic structure, content modeling, structured data, technical SEO, AI-era discoverability, and performance.
4–10 weeks
$20–50k
Indicative ranges for scoping conversations — not a rate card.
No. 03Experience
Years spent inside university digital ecosystems — enrollment marketing, decentralized publishing, institutional stakeholders, accessibility requirements, content governance and the committees that come with all of it. Prior institutional work is attributed to its real context on the work itself.
Led by
Keith McAleer
Founder, Applied Artifact
Keith brings more than a decade of experience working inside higher education, across communications, digital strategy, organizational initiatives and public-facing experiences.
No. 04The model
01
No account layer. The people you meet are the people who make it.
02
The team is built around the problem, not an org chart.
03
Strategy, design and development stay in one room.
04
Fewer layers between a decision and the work.
No. 05Process
01
Stakeholders, data, and an honest audit of what exists.
02
Agree on what matters, what it costs, and what done means.
03
Design and build together, in the open, in a weekly rhythm.
04
Launch, measure, and leave your team able to run it.
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