Like most of us, higher education marketing teams are being told they must ‘do more with less’ increasingly often.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about that phrase is that each time you hear it, the harder it gets to actually achieve. For teams that are already lean and often running on fumes as it is, it can seem like there are no realistic or reliable ways to make it happen.
However, our years of experience with higher education clients have shown us one way that teams can do more with less not just today, but every time they receive that soul-crushing mandate in the future.
It’s called Continuous Website Improvement, a.k.a. ongoing support.
When it’s done correctly, your site stays relevant and high-performing for years without the expenditure of a full redesign and rebuild. And it’s the reason many of our clients’ websites regularly last 10 years or more.
Website support should always help move your website forward.
Of course, support needs to handle the fundamentals:
- Security updates
- Module and plugin maintenance
- Performance monitoring
- Accessibility fixes
All of this needs to happen consistently and carefully. But a well-maintained website can still be hard to use. It can still have confusing navigation. Prospective students can still end up lost and confused when they’re just trying to find the right program information or the right person to contact.
Therein lies the real opportunity: using ongoing support to make the site better over time, with manageable work that clearly connects to what your users need.
This typically includes:
- Improving key user journeys
- Refining navigation and content structure
- Testing and improving conversion paths
- Addressing accessibility issues over time
- Updating templates as needs change
- Cleaning up confusing or outdated content
- Making key pages and calls to action easier to use
In other words, practical progress that reflects the reality most higher ed teams are living in.
Small bites create big wins.
We’ve seen departments make significant improvements through targeted, small projects and ongoing support. This gives teams a way to get a useful, well-built site live without having to wait for huge budget approvals or total alignment.
At the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), many sites launched under $50K and continued to improve through structured support.
Here are some examples:
- The Memory and Aging Center redesigned their site, then used ongoing support to improve usability and performance. This made critical information easier to find for patients and researchers.
- The Department of Urology spent over a decade making incremental improvements before evolving into a full rebuild, ensuring every step delivered value along the way.
- The Seligman Lab launched a focused, research-driven site for under $7K, then used support hours to evolve it as their needs grew.
In practice: how higher ed websites improve through Kanopi support.
University of Michigan
For clients like the University of Michigan School of Information, our work doesn’t stop at launch. Ongoing support means page designs evolve, content gets easier to find and editorial workflows keep improving. Large teams can manage complexity more confidently without waiting for a full redesign every time something needs to change.
UC Berkeley
University teams move faster when support remains in place after launch. For clients like UC Berkeley, this kind of continuous partnership makes it possible to introduce real improvements to performance and accessibility. The team stops reinventing the wheel and starts actually moving forward.
College of Western Idaho
We’ve supported institutions like the College of Western Idaho long after launch, continuously refining how their site performs and how their team manages it as needs evolve.
Continuous improvement works — if you’re committed
Continuous improvement only works if there’s intention behind it. This is where many support models fall short. Without strategy, support inevitably becomes reactive.
The best support models start with three questions: what matters most, how your team actually works and what needs to happen next.
From there, it’s about executing consistently:
- Clear priorities tied to your goals
- Ongoing collaboration with your team
- Regular checkpoints to assess what’s working
- A backlog that balances quick wins with longer-term improvements
- A realistic understanding of your team’s capacity
It’s not just about completing tasks. It’s about making continued progress.
Designed for teams under constant demand
If you’re managing a higher ed website today, you’re spinning a lot of plates at once:
- Multiple interest-holders
- Complex content structures
- Accessibility requirements
- Constant demand for updates
Strategic website support gives teams a way to keep moving without turning every improvement into a major project. It gives you flexibility when priorities shift and access to people who understand higher ed complexity. It also helps you decide what’s worth doing now, what can wait and what can be left as-is.
In practical terms, this means your team is better equipped to keep making progress where it counts:
- Respond faster when priorities change
- Improve the site without waiting for a full redesign
- Make better decisions about time and budget
- Keep accessibility from becoming an afterthought
- Build improvements into the life of the site
After all, your website isn’t a one-time project. It’s infrastructure. It’s often the first place people go when they’re trying to decide whether your institution can help them.
Continuous improvement builds trust — and retains it
Your website doesn’t earn trust at launch. It earns it over time, every time someone finds the information they need and can act on it with confidence. That’s the value of continuous website improvement. It turns support into a steady practice of listening, adjusting and making your site easier for people to trust. For higher ed teams stretched thin, that kind of steady attention keeps your website aligned with the people who rely on it every day.
