Websites for universities, colleges and training institutions.
We build and look after institutional websites: multi-site setups for campuses and departments, course and programme catalogues, admissions enquiry flows that reach your systems, and accessibility built in rather than audited at the end. Education is a substantial part of what this studio actually does.
What an institutional site has to do that a business site does not
Six of them. Every one is a structural decision, and every one is expensive to retrofit.
Departments editing independently
Twenty people with edit rights and no design training, none of whom should be able to break the layout. That is a component model and a permissions model, decided before anything is designed.
An admissions cycle at ten times the traffic
For six weeks a year the site carries an order of magnitude more load, and it is the six weeks when a slow page costs an enrolment rather than a bounce.
A catalogue that changes every term
Programmes, fees, intakes and faculty, updated on an academic calendar by people whose job is not the website. It has to be structured content, not pages somebody re-types.
Accessibility as an obligation
For most institutions this is a legal and funding requirement rather than a preference, and it is far cheaper designed in than retrofitted after an audit.
Multiple campuses, one identity
Several sites that must look like one institution while letting each run its own content. This is what multisite exists for, and most institutions are doing it with duplicated installations instead.
The student information system
Enquiries, applications and course data usually live somewhere else. The website's job is to talk to it reliably, not to become a second copy of it.
Six things, on WordPress
Almost always WordPress, because an institution needs many editors with different permissions and it is still the best answer to that problem.
- WordPress Multisite
- One installation, one design system, separate content and separate editors per campus or department. Updates applied once rather than eleven times.
- Course and programme catalogues
- Structured content with proper markup, so a programme page is data your team edits and search engines can read as a course rather than as prose.
- Admissions enquiry flows
- Forms that reach your CRM or student information system with the fields your admissions team actually works from, and that do not silently stop sending.
- News, events and academic calendars
- The parts that get updated weekly, built so that updating them is a two-minute job for a non-technical person.
- Alumni and placement sections
- Usually the most neglected part of an institutional site and often the most useful one for recruitment.
- Accessibility to WCAG 2.1 AA
- Contrast, focus order, keyboard operation, headings and landmarks — tested by hand as well as by tooling, because automated checks catch roughly a third of it.
The technical detail of how we build on WordPress — block themes, field architecture and multisite — is on the WordPress development page.
Getting through admissions season
The intake weeks are the only ones where the website is unambiguously commercial, and they are entirely predictable. Care Growth at ₹29,999 / $499 gives you eight hours a month and an eight-hour response — enough to build each intake’s landing pages ahead of the season rather than during it.
We agree an update freeze for the peak weeks and run a readiness pass before it opens.
Replacing a site you already have
This is the most common institutional brief: hundreds of pages, a decade of history, several systems bolted on, and nobody left who knows why. It is a redesign with a full URL inventory and a redirect map, and sometimes a migration as well.
The part institutions underestimate is content: deciding what to keep is slower than rebuilding it.
Education questions, answered
Do you work with government-funded institutions?
Yes. Public and grant-funded institutions usually bring procurement requirements, accessibility obligations and audit trails, and those are process rather than obstacles. We will complete your vendor forms and work to your procurement timeline; we will not pretend that timeline is shorter than it is.
Can departments edit their own pages?
Yes, and safely. Each department gets edit rights to its own section, working with a fixed set of blocks that cannot produce a broken layout. The alternative — one administrator as the bottleneck for every change — is why so many institutional sites have three-year-old content.
How do you handle accessibility compliance?
Built in from the design rather than audited at the end: contrast checked in the palette, focus states designed, keyboard order deliberate, headings and landmarks structured. Then a manual keyboard-only pass before launch, because automated tools find about a third of the issues and the remaining two thirds are the ones that actually stop somebody.
Can you integrate with our student information system?
Usually, and the honest answer depends on what it exposes. If it has an API we build to it; if it can export on a schedule we work from that; if it can do neither, the practical answer is often a form that reaches your team rather than a fragile automated bridge. We will tell you which of those yours is before quoting.
What happens during admissions season?
We plan for it rather than survive it. An update freeze for the peak weeks agreed in advance, a readiness pass on the pages the campaign points at, and the landing pages for each intake built before the season rather than during it. On a care plan that work comes out of your included hours.
How is this priced?
As a project, scoped and fixed. A multi-site institutional build is quoted from the number of sites, the catalogue size and the integrations rather than from a page count. Ongoing work afterwards is a care plan — Growth is the usual tier here, because an institution generates a steady flow of changes and needs a faster response during the admissions cycle.
Bring us the site everyone complains about.
30 minutes with someone who has worked on institutional sites, and an honest view of whether your problem is the website, the content process, or the system behind it. Those are three different projects and only one of them is ours.