Repeat after me: Your website is not for you.
It’s not about you, your boss, your boss’s boss, your headaches, your file system, your reporting structure, your accomplishments, or your job description. It’s all about them — your audiences — and for higher education, that means it’s all about your current, past, and future students.
Public websites should be about and for students, but all too often they reflect the priorities of those working in the institution rather than those being helped by that institution.
So how do we flip the script? Here are some common problems and some ideas on how to begin to fix them.
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You want your web copy to be conversational, speak directly to your audience, and reflect how a dialogue would occur between a student and your staff, if they were standing right in front of you. Instead of talking about people impersonally as “students” or “applicants” or “registrants,” you should simply be using “you.” Instead of talking about “the institution,” ” the faculty member,” or “the department,” use “we.”
This isn’t just more personal — it shows that you’re taking ownership of your processes, policies, and messages — and that makes the experience much more authentic, approachable, and human.
Prospective and new students won’t necessarily know what a bursar is or does, what accreditation is, or what a transcript is used for. Make sure you’re either using terms that are more clearly understand, such as “paying my bill,” or use the insider term, if you must, but also provide a short definition in-line, such as “transcripts (your official record of classes, grades and degrees).”
It’s understandable to want to abbreviate long titles that get used again and again and natural to come up with short acronyms to describe them. The problem with using them on your website is that your audiences aren’t familiar enough with the full title to know what the acronym means, so they won’t have any idea what you’re talking about. If you must use acronyms, be sure they are in the body copy only after being spelled out fully once or twice before. Never use acronyms in page titles or navigation.
Students have many complex processes to navigate, from the initial enrollment application process to applying for financial aid, selecting housing and dining plans, making course selections, and on and on. It’s tempting to want to get the process that needs to be followed out there front and center.
Hitting website visitors with dense process and procedure without answering these two critical promotional questions is bad form:
Students need context to help them understand what you are asking of them, how much effort it will take, and how best to approach the complexity of the necessary steps.
These categories are catch-all sections that don’t provide usable content in the context of student needs:
Every system has its quirks and inefficiencies. Every policy has its exceptions; every procedure its imperfections. It can be tempting to try to cover every possible student process outcome to cover yourself and stave off difficult students — and over time, the painful exceptions and corner cases can become the most top of mind for you as a staff member.
But don’t take the bait — rather, provide content that conveys what the ideal process looks like, so that students can emulate that. Avoid painting a picture of dysfunction and draining their confidence out of the gates. Yes, some will fail or do it wrong. But if you plan for success rather than failure, the whole tone of the experience will be much more positive.
They don’t know you, your system, your rules, or your regulations. They just need someone to help them achieve their goals — whether that is finding a particular piece of information or completing a particular task. Turning your visitor experience from a barrier to a bridge isn’t easy — but is critically important. After all, happy students attract other students, and more students are what keeps your institution in business.