University websites are huge. They have to be because each institution offers so many courses and combinations, delivered via different faculties and departments. In an ever-more competitive market, there is just so much information that potential students want or need to help them make a decision whether to apply. In 2015, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) introduced new requirements for universities and other education providers to provide certain ‘essential’ information in an easy-to-find-and-understand format.
Among the first group of universities to respond was King’s College London (KCL), which used the CMA requirements as an opportunity to overhaul its website and deliver an enhanced UX with accurate and responsive search tools. Central to this was providing users with course recommendations – ‘if you’re interested in this, you may also be interested in this’ – to broaden the reach of courses that do not obviously align with A level subjects. Chaytor Dewey was commissioned to review, edit and re-present the entire site content.
As well as creating engaging landing pages for all the faculties and for ‘lifestyle’ areas of the site to sell KCL’s overall offer, we rewrote 450+ undergraduate and postgraduate course descriptions. We devised a structure, style and tone for pages (including a writing guide for subsequent contributors), employed organic SEO to enhance ‘findability’, and addressed the CMA’s requirements while simultaneously stripping out extraneous or repeated detail and responding to the various faculties and departments’ individual concerns. For each course, we drafted an engaging overview, a set of key benefits and detailed sections on content, teaching, assessment, and location.
To say the project was a behemoth is an understatement, but the content was delivered on time and on budget.
Words matter. 