Higher education · a focused practice
Make the complex easier to use.
We design and build research-driven, human-centered websites for higher education: accessible, high-performing and grounded in how students and staff actually use them.
The environment
University websites grow the way campuses do: one addition at a time.
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
Ownership is distributed
Hundreds of publishers, dozens of sub-sites, and no single owner of the visitor's experience.
B
Content mirrors the org chart
Visitors arrive with questions; sites answer with departments.
C
Accessibility debt compounds
Every template generation leaves a layer behind, and the legal and ethical stakes keep rising.
D
Discovery has changed
Prospective students now arrive through search and AI assistants that read structure, not brochures.
Typical engagements
Four shapes of work.
The lowest-risk way to start, priced below what most agencies quote for discovery alone. Stakeholder discovery, analytics and UX research, accessibility assessment, content and IA review, technology assessment, and a sequenced roadmap.
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.
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, performance.
Continuous improvement, accessibility upkeep, content and platform support for the site you have, whether or not we built it.
Experience
A studio that knows higher education from the inside.
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.
Practitioners
Strategy & technology
More than a decade inside higher education
Design & research
Product, strategy & UX
Design & development
Multimedia & creative
PR & content strategy
Process
How an engagement runs.
01
Research
Interviews and research first: who your users are, what they're trying to do, and how the site and its architecture work today.
02
Frame
Agree on what matters, what it costs, and what done means.
03
Make
Design and build together, in the open, at a steady cadence.
04
Ship
Launch, measure, and decide together: your team runs it, or we stay on and keep improving it.
InquiryTwo working days
Discuss a project.
Plain language is fine. We read everything and reply within two working days.