The Best College Websites You’ll See This Year

Almost a month ago now we got to help Warner Pacific College launch their new online brand. Getting there was a process took several months of intense work, including some industry research during the early stages. Getting exposed to the best college websites out there—the ones that are breaking the mold in order to become more useful tools for their audiences—was a lot of fun. So I thought I’d list five of the websites that stood out to me, whether it was for the quality of their design, ease of use, engaging content, etc. (and yes, I’ve added Warner Pacific at the end):

1. Lafayette College Website

2. Biola University Website

3. Middlebury College Website

4. University of Puget Sound Website

5. Georgetown University Website

Bonus: Warner Pacific College Website

A (very) honorable mention goes to Boston University’s Bostonia website. (The reason I didn’t include it in the list above is because, as a magazine website, it is structured to meet completely different objectives than a college/university website.)

Now in putting together a list of the best college websites I’ve only included websites that represent a whole college, and that’s because re-designing an entire college website is such a large undertaking. Working with multiple departments, accounting for the needs of multiple audiences and structuring large numbers of pages makes it a significant challenge to ensure consistent quality in all of the many pieces that make up a website. That said, there are of course many colleges who have great homepages and there are also individual departments with beautifully designed sites of their own. In fact, eduStyle is a great resource to explore more of what’s out there.

Even so, from what I’ve seen there seems to be a dearth of higher education websites that break out of the cookie cutter mold and do both user experience design and beautiful visual design. But you can bet that will change over the next few years as more colleges begin to understand the importance of user experience design and start to take advantage of content management systems, HTML5, and CSS3.

So what are the best college websites you’ve seen?