University of NorthWest

Context

The University of NorthWest is an ISO-certified international institution offering undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral programmes, with a published address in Brooklyn, New York and students recruited across several countries.

Challenge

A university website is not one website. A prospective student, an enrolled student, a member of staff, an alumnus, an employer and a researcher all arrive at the same domain wanting entirely different things, and each of them experiences the others' content as noise. The failure mode is a homepage that tries to serve all six and ends up as a link farm.

Strategy

We separated the audiences at the top level — study with us, student life, research, business and employers, international — and gave operational destinations such as the student portal, staff portal, library and alumni their own utility layer above the main navigation. That keeps the primary navigation for people who are deciding, and gives people who have already decided a fast route past it.

Programme discovery was treated as the primary conversion path. Featured programmes appear on the homepage as named degrees rather than as faculty names, because an applicant searches for a subject, not for an academic department.

Design and system

The composition opens on a single positioning line about borderless learning and moves directly into programmes. Recognition, flexibility, career support and research are stated as four distinct claims rather than one paragraph, so a reader scanning for the one that matters to them can find it.

Build

The site supports admissions enquiries alongside the portal and library destinations, and holds the international audience in the same information structure as the domestic one rather than splitting into a separate microsite that would immediately drift out of date.

Outcome

Built an information architecture that separates prospective students, current students, staff and employers, so each audience reaches its own entry point without wading through the others.