Universities have unique challenges and needs - some technical, some not. Many of GoodFolk’s staff are career-switching academics who have an inside perspective on how higher ed institutions operate. That paired with our design and development expertise helps us provide excellent experience for departments, institutes, and non-academic units within the university.

Information Architecture for Academic Departments

The architecture of departmental websites is in a pretty unique place: on the one hand, there are established conventions across the industry that users expect. You can see examples that structure across different, different disciplines, and different departments. To a certain extent, this is because the system works, more or less - users are sorted by their relationship to the department. But frequently, this relegates all communications work to the “News” section of the site.

Our architects will help you think through these questions and see whether the standard structure is right for your department.

Making Research Public: Labs & Institutes

In contrast to departments, which typically have to serve a larger number of audiences in more conventional ways, with institutes, the primary challenge is effectively communicating the institute’s overall mission, what projects they have ongoing, who is associated with them, and how those projects matter. As a consequence, much of our work for institutes revolves around the projects themselves. Sometimes, this is a matter of building flexible project + research templates for the sites. Other times, it’s building free-standing project-specific landing pages.

No matter what, the key challenge is getting researcher buy-in so that the site can properly communicate their valuable work.

 Universities that trust us