University websites are rarely short on content. If anything, they have too much — years of pages built by different departments, at different times, with different naming conventions, all still live. The problem isn't a lack of information. It's that the site is organised around how the institution is structured internally, not around what a student is actually trying to do.
A prospective student doesn't think in terms of "Faculty of X, Office of Y, Division of Z." They think in tasks: When is the deadline. What documents do I need. How much does it cost. Who do I email if something goes wrong. When a website's navigation mirrors an org chart instead of these tasks, every one of those questions takes more clicks than it should — and on a phone, in a hurry, between classes, that's often enough clicks for someone to give up and email instead, recreating the same enquiry load a good website should have prevented.
A few patterns show up again and again on institutional sites:
- Key information — deadlines, requirements, fees — buried two or three levels deep, or trapped inside a PDF that doesn't show up in on-site search.
- Old pages left live indefinitely, so search results return three versions of "how to apply," two of them outdated.
- Inconsistent terminology across departments for the same thing, which breaks both human search and AI-assisted search alike.
- Mobile layouts that technically work but weren't actually designed around how someone browses a university site on a phone — scanning fast, looking for one fact.
None of this is really a technology problem. It's an editorial and information-architecture problem wearing a technology costume. The fix is unglamorous: audit what exists, retire what's outdated, restructure navigation and content around the questions people actually ask, and put a governance process in place so it doesn't quietly drift back into department-shaped chaos within a year. That was the core of the work behind the HKBU website revamp — less about a visual redesign, more about making sure a person with a real question could get to a real, current answer without needing to already know how the university is organised.