There’s something satisfying about a website redesign. You get new colors, cleaner templates, better typography, a modern homepage, and maybe a new navigation system and some impressive components for telling stories.

The new site launches. Everyone celebrates it. Yay!

And six months later, many of the same problems are back:

Pages are outdated. Navigation is getting cluttered. Users have their own ideas of what a great design looks like, so every page is different. PDFs are starting to accumulate. Prospective students still struggle to find answers. Accessibility issues are creeping in. Pages are slow. Search engines and AI tools aren’t understanding your content any better than they did before.

The website looks different, but it doesn’t necessarily work better. That’s because many website problems aren’t actually design problems.

You probably don’t need to wait for a redesign

Before we even talk about how to redesign a website, there’s another question worth asking: How much could you improve your website right now without redesigning it at all?

Probably quite a bit.

• You can remove outdated content.
• You can rewrite confusing pages.
• You can improve headings and page titles.
• You can simplify navigation.
• You can identify orphaned or duplicate content.
• You can make academic program pages more consistent.
• You can improve accessibility.
• You can optimize images and page performance.
• You can clarify calls to action.
• You can create better ownership and review processes.
• You can start structuring important content more deliberately.
• You can make pages easier for both humans and AI systems to understand.
• You can train your content contributors to create better content.

None of those things require a new color palette. And most don’t require a multi-million-dollar (ok, or tens-of-thousands-of-dollar), multi-year redesign. That’s important, because institutions sometimes treat the next redesign as the moment when they’ll finally fix everything. The thinking is: we’ll clean up the content then, we’ll deal with governance then, we’ll improve accessibility then, we’ll start thinking about AEO then.

In the meantime, a year goes by, often several years, and your audiences keep using the same website you have today. 

Sure, a redesign can be a wonderful catalyst for change, but it shouldn’t be the prerequisite for it. 

And if you are redesigning, fix the foundation first

If you are planning a redesign, that’s even more reason to think about these things now. Start with the foundation, not with the new look of the homepage. Before debating colors, components, layouts, or whether your hero should contain a video, understand the system the design needs to support.

Ask yourself:

• What content do you actually need?
• Who are your audiences?
• What are they trying to accomplish?
• How should information be organized?
• Who owns it?
• How will it stay current?
• Who will be allowed to change what?
• How will accessibility be maintained?
• How fast does the site need to be?
• How should content be structured for search engines and AI?
• Where would personalization actually improve an experience?
• And how will the people maintaining the site every day make all of this sustainable?

Those decisions should shape the redesign, not come after it.

A redesign can hide problems without solving them

When an institution decides its website needs a redesign, the conversation often starts with what people can see. I’m sure you’ve heard these comments before: The homepage feels dated. The navigation is confusing. Competitors’ websites look better. The templates don’t give us enough flexibility. 

While those may all be legitimate concerns, they’re symptoms, not root causes of the performance problems. If prospective students can’t find tuition information, changing the font isn’t going to help. If academic program information exists in five different places with five different owners, putting it into a prettier template doesn’t solve the underlying content problem. If nobody knows who’s responsible for reviewing the Biology department’s pages, those pages will eventually become outdated again.

And if your most important information is buried inside giant WYSIWYG fields with little semantic structure, a beautiful new design won’t suddenly make that content easier for Google, ChatGPT, or other systems to understand.

You can redesign your way around these problems temporarily, but you can’t redesign them away.

Content has to be part of the project

One of the biggest mistakes institutions make is treating content as something that gets moved into the new website after the important work is finished. The focus is on designing beautiful new templates and building out the site. And then, they’ll migrate the content into the site. But that approach doesn’t take into account that the content is the website.

Before deciding how a page should look, you should know what job that page needs to do.

• Who is the audience?
• What question are they trying to answer?
• What action should they take next?
• What information actually belongs on the page?
• What information can and should be removed?

A redesign is one of the rare opportunities an institution has to examine thousands of pages and ask a very useful question:

Why does this exist?

Migrating everything simply because it existed on the old site is how you end up with a brand-new website carrying ten years of organizational baggage. It’s like moving into a new house and taking every single thing from your old house (think a box of mystery cords for electronics you no longer own, a printer you haven’t used since 2015 or single-use utensils accumulated from takeout orders) into your new one. 

Your content also has to work for the audience

There’s another problem a new design can’t solve: content that simply isn’t working for the people who need it.

You can put a 1,300-word wall of text into a beautiful new template, but it’s still a 1,300-word wall of text. You can improve the typography and spacing around a paragraph filled with institutional jargon, and guess what, it’s still jargon.

And you can build a beautifully designed academic program page that never clearly tells a prospective student what they’ll learn, what they can do with the degree, or why they should choose your institution.

That’s why a redesign should include a serious look at audience fit, readability, and clarity.

Ask honest questions about every important page:

• Who is this content actually written for?
• Does it assume knowledge the audience probably doesn’t have?
• Does it use the language prospective students use, or the language the institution uses internally?
• Can someone scan the page and quickly understand the most important information?
• Are sentences and paragraphs unnecessarily complex?
• Do headings help people find answers, or are they clever labels that make sense only to the person who wrote them?

And perhaps most importantly: does the page answer the questions that brought someone there in the first place?

This matters for humans, but increasingly it matters for machines, too. Clear language, meaningful headings, well-structured information, and direct answers make content easier for people to consume and easier for search engines and AI systems to interpret.

The goal should be to reduce the amount of work you ask your audience to do just to understand what you’re trying to tell them.

A redesign can make content easier to read, but only a content strategy can make it worth reading.

Information architecture isn’t just navigation

Information architecture often gets reduced to a new top navigation, but it’s really only part of IA. The bigger question is how information is organized across the entire digital experience.

Universities are highly complicated organizations. They may have multiple schools, colleges, departments, programs, offices, centers, initiatives, faculty profiles, news, events, policies, resources, and services.

The organizational chart may make perfect sense internally, but it probably doesn’t make sense and doesn’t mean anything to a prospective student.

A redesign should force some uncomfortable questions.

• Should users have to know which administrative office owns a service before they can find it?
• Do five departments really need separate explanations of the same process?
• Are academic programs organized around institutional structure, or around how students actually explore them?
• Do labels reflect terminology your audiences understand, or internal terminology they’re expected to figure out?

You want to create an information environment people can understand, not just a different navigation menu.

Governance determines what happens after launch

I talked about governance quite a bit in a previous post. Admittedly, governance may be the least glamorous part of a redesign. But it’s also the part that determines whether the redesign will be successful.

Eventually the agency leaves, and the launch party ends. And hundreds of people across the institution start editing the website again.

So decide in advance:

• Who can create pages?
• Who can publish them?
• Who owns each section?
• Who reviews content for accuracy, and how often?
• What happens when an employee leaves?
• Who can change layouts?
• Who is responsible for accessibility?
• What happens when content becomes outdated?

If you don’t answer those questions, your shiny new website immediately starts accumulating the same problems as the old one.

An important thing to point out: Good governance doesn’t mean central Marketing has to control every word on the website. Governance isn’t all about restrictions. It also includes education.

It means people understand their responsibilities, contributors have appropriate guardrails, and the institution has mechanisms for keeping content accurate, accessible, consistent, and useful over time.

Your contributors are part of the system

Governance is way more than just a policy document. Eventually, governance has to translate into what an actual person sees when they log into the CMS to update a page.

Higher ed websites are maintained by people with very different jobs, responsibilities, experience levels, and comfort with technology. A faculty coordinator, a department admin, and a marketing specialist all touch the same website. Most of them didn’t sign up to be web professionals. They’re doing this work on top of everything else. So the system you build has to meet them where they are.

That means giving contributors:

• Clear templates that make it hard to break the design and easy to do the right thing.
• Guardrails that protect accessibility and brand standards without requiring everyone to become an expert.
• Structured fields instead of open-ended text boxes, so content stays consistent and machines can actually read it.
• Straightforward workflows for review and publishing, so accountability is built in rather than bolted on.
• Training and support that treat contributors as partners, not problems to be managed.

When your CMS makes the right choice the easy choice, quality becomes the default. That’s the difference between a website that decays after launch and one that stays healthy for years.

The best tools disappear into the background. Contributors focus on their message. The system quietly enforces the standards that keep the whole experience coherent, accessible, and on brand.

A stunning homepage will get you compliments and create initial excitement.But clear content, sound architecture, and real governance will get you results: students who find what they need, contributors who feel supported, and a website that still works well long after launch..

A successful website redesign is about building a content ecosystem that works for your audiences, your contributors, your web team, and your institution’s long-term goals – much more than just a bold new look.

So before you approve the budget for another cosmetic refresh, take an honest inventory of your content, your information architecture, and your governance. Fix the foundation. Give your contributors the tools and guardrails to keep it strong. Then, if you redesign, you’ll be making something genuinely better, not just something prettier.