The University of Leicester website plays many roles at once.
It’s a recruitment channel, a research showcase, a hub for staff and students, and a critical contributor to institutional reputation. Over time, however, those roles have grown faster than the structures supporting them.
Our new approach to content and user experience/user interface (UX/UI) design will set out a clear, shared approach to how we design, structure and govern the University’s web presence. Placing user needs, accessibility and long-term sustainability at the heart of everything we do.
Why we need a new approach
Higher education websites now operate in a very different environment.
Most prospective students arrive on mobile devices, often via social media, search or email. At the same time, search engines and generative AI increasingly rely on structured, authoritative content to surface answers.
The revised approach responds to these realities by aligning content design and UX/UI decisions around three broad institutional priorities:
- Student recruitment
- Research visibility and impact
- Institutional reputation
Rather than treating content and design as separate elements, they will work together to support scalable delivery without sacrificing quality or clarity.
Mobile-first is not a constraint – it’s a discipline
A genuinely mobile-first approach will underpin our plans around content and design. This means designing for small screens first and resisting the temptation to simply ‘squeeze down’ desktop experiences.
Practically, this translates into:
- Vertical scrolling instead of complex navigation
- Front-loaded information and clear calls to action
- Progressive disclosure that lets users dig deeper without feeling overwhelmed
This discipline benefits all users, not just those on smartphones. Clear hierarchy, fast performance, and focused interactions lead to better experiences on any device.
Designing systems, not pages
A key shift will be the move away from page-by-page design and authoring, towards structured, reusable content supported by a shared design system.
From a content perspective, this means creating modular content types, such as news stories or testimonials, that can be reused across multiple contexts. We write content once and publish or repurpose it many times, reducing duplication while improving consistency – sometimes summed up by the COPE (create once, publish everywhere) acronym.
From a UX/UI perspective, a reusable design system provides:
- Consistent layouts and components
- Clear governance over when and how elements can be customised
- Faster delivery with lower long-term maintenance costs
Consistency here isn’t about uniformity for its own sake; it’s about building trust through familiarity and predictability.
Writing for humans and machines
Search remains critical, but how search works is changing. Alongside the established search engine optimisation (SEO) foundations websites have been adopting for many years, our approach will explicitly account for generative engine optimisation (GEO) and answer engine optimisation (AEO).
Content is written for humans first, but structured so that search engines and AI tools can clearly interpret and summarise it. That means:
- One clear topic per page or content type
- Plain language with academic credibility
- Evidence‑based claims and named experts
- Consistent facts across the website
Well-structured content not only performs better in search; it’s also easier to reuse, update and personalise.
Accessibility and inclusion as defaults
Accessibility is not treated as a checklist or final-stage validation. All templates, components, and content patterns will be designed to meet industry standards – we’ll be working to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA from the outset.
This includes plain English (consider the average reading age of adults in the UK is estimated to be between 9 and 11 years old), meaningful link text, logical reading order, accessible media and mobile-friendly interactions. Accessibility by design improves usability for everyone and protects us from costly retrofitting later.
What this means in practice
For colleagues across the University, our approach to this work aims to make publishing simpler, faster, and more effective, while maintaining quality and compliance.
Ultimately, this is about future-proofing. By focusing on user needs, reusable systems and robust governance, we’re building a web platform that can evolve alongside changing technology, behaviour, and institutional priorities – without starting from scratch each time.
