NYU | Casa Italiana

Our approach to brand building in education depends on the role an institution plays in its ecosystem, its network of relationships, and the influences around it. For example, community-based education brands resonate most when they reflect the real lived experiences and views of students and staff. We compare how people inside and outside the institution perceive it, set a clear, culturally relevant position, and track progress as messaging and identity evolve.

On the other end of the spectrum, for pioneering or future-defining institutions, brand strategy is more future-facing and directional, setting a path forward based on a distinctive vision. In these cases, we typically opt to lead with vision and belief, using research to test clarity and credibility.

A full education website redesign typically includes strategy, experience design, content planning, design, development, and launch, sequenced to reduce risk and align complex stakeholder groups. At Takt, we begin by clarifying your institution’s positioning and messaging, then translate real user needs into clear UX and Authoring Experience (AX) requirements that define journeys, content, and functionality.

Designs and user flows are validated early through testing before moving into development, content migration, and QA across multiple sprints, with decisions informed by both qualitative insight (interviews, workshops) and quantitative data (analytics, surveys). This approach is reflected in our work with New York University’s Webby Award–winning Casa Italiana website.

Keeping content-heavy education websites fast starts with treating performance as a design constraint, not a technical afterthought. We structure content modularly, limit unnecessary animations that could impact page load times, and prioritize what loads first so users get clarity and value immediately.

At Takt, we pair thoughtful information architecture with modern development practices, performance budgets, and ongoing monitoring to ensure speed holds up as content grows. The result is a site that remains accessible, search-friendly, and responsive without sacrificing depth or scale.

Post-launch, effective content management needs to support the system that’s been built. To support this, we provide a Content Editing Guide as well as a recorded training session to teach our clients how to best add new pages and content to the website.

Education websites should treat events and programming calendars as discovery tools, not dumping grounds. The goal is to help different audiences quickly find what’s relevant to them, while preserving performance, clarity, and SEO.

We design event systems with clear taxonomy, filtering, and modular templates so calendars scale without becoming overwhelming or outdated. Combined with strong governance and automation, this ensures events remain accurate, searchable, and useful over time.

Education organizations maintain website accessibility by building it into the website’s system, rather than treating it as a post-launch audit. That means designing with semantic HTML, proper heading structures, keyboard navigation, colour contrast, and ARIA labels from the start, and then creating templates and modules that effectively maintain those standards whenever new content is published.

Key insight: Accessibility sustained through code and design decisions is durable. Accessibility that depends solely on individual content editors getting it right every time is a lot less dependable at scale.

The truth is that compliance is a score rather than a binary outcome. For example, a website can be 90% compliant when measured against a specific standard and still be considered highly accessible. Content updates will always introduce new variables (e.g., an image missing alt text, a heading level out of order, etc.), so what matters most is creating and maintaining a governance plan that consistently identifies and resolves these sorts of inevitable challenges.

We also work with institutions to determine the right compliance target:

• WCAG 2.1 AA is our baseline for every project
• Some institutions need 2.2 or even AAA, which carries significantly stricter requirements that aren’t necessary for most organizations.
• Design decisions, like detailed animations and visual effects, also impact compliance at higher levels, so those trade-offs need to be part of the conversation early on in the engagement.
• Reporting requirements also matter quite a bit. If an institution is required to report accessibility to a regulatory board or internal department, that shapes how stringent the standards need to be and which stakeholders are involved in the decision-making process.

For institutions that aren’t currently fully compliant, the most important deliverable often looks something like a strategic roadmap, i.e., a prioritized plan that catalogues what’s been addressed, what’s outstanding, and what the path to resolution looks like. Flagged items can be ranked by severity, and not all of them will require action. Some are minor, some aren’t applicable, and some reflect deliberate decisions the team has made with full awareness of the trade-off.

We’ve built accessibility-first systems for institutions like Queen’s University, New York University, Adler University, and Nunavut Arctic College, and work directly with campus accessibility offices to ensure educational websites meet both institutional standards and the specific needs of diverse user communities.