Your institution’s website is one of your strongest branding assets. Creating a best-in-class web experience for your audiences and maintaining it requires the right people in the right roles. But how many people do you need? What roles should they play? How much depends on your CMS, your content production strategy, or the few dozen stakeholders who “just want to make a quick edit”?
Here’s the good news: you don’t need a huge team as long as you have a strategic team. Whether your model of web governance is centralized, decentralized, or somewhere in between, there’s a way to structure your university’s web team so it supports your goals and those of your contributors.
Assess Your Current CMS, Site Complexity, and Staffing
Get some clarity on your situation. Before you go drafting org charts or rewriting job descriptions, ask three questions:
1. What CMS are we using?
A WordPress site with 30 content contributors requires a different level of support than an enterprise Drupal install.
2. How big and complex is the site?
A single, streamlined .edu with clear governance is one thing. A legacy multi-domain labyrinth of program pages, faculty bios, and microsites requires a different level of care.
3. What support do we already have?
Is there an understanding that the developers within your IT department will also serve Marcomm? Do you keep an agency on retainer for web support? How staffed-up is your central marketing team? Identifying any gaps will assist you in identifying the roles you actually need to fill.
Tip: Document the true state of things today, not what’s supposed to be true. Gaps, workarounds, and unofficial duties all provide valuable clues to where your web team structure might need more support and reinforcement.
Define the Core Web Team Roles Every Institution Needs
There’s no one size that fits all for every institution, but there are core functions that have to be accounted for on every successful higher education web team. Whether these roles live in one person or four, they need to be covered.
1. Strategy
This person or team holds the vision. They think in systems and are able to connect the dots across teams. A strategist ensures that the website does more than function; it actively moves the needle on broader institutional goals.
2. Content
Your web content is not self-managing. You need someone who understands how to write, edit, and maintain content for humans (and search engines and generative AI, too).
3. User Experience & Design
This role shapes the website experience, ensuring that every page is visually consistent, accessible to all users, and designed to support institutional goals through thoughtful UX and a cohesive design system.
4. Development
Even the tidiest CMS needs attention from a developer. Whether it’s minor front-end changes, troubleshooting plugin issues, or core updates, you need someone technical to keep things running.
Tip: If you don’t have in-house developers, make sure your CMS isn’t so customized with plugins that it makes your implementation unwieldy, fragile, and difficult to keep updated.
H2: Establish a Clear Web Governance Model
“Everyone owns the website” sounds collaborative, but without a defined structure, it’s chaos. That doesn’t mean all ownership should be centralized. After all, many university web teams want to, or are best resourced to, rely on decentralized academic and departmental units to support web work. However, it does mean you need a clear model.
Here’s what we know holds up well when it comes to higher education web governance:
- Defined roles: Who owns what, who approves what, and who’s responsible when something breaks?
- Governance structure: Its policies as well as working norms. What’s expected, what’s supported, and what happens when someone goes rogue?
- Guardrails: Templates, standards, permissions, and training will keep your site consistent, cohesive, and professional, safeguarding your brand and ensuring the best UX for your site visitors.
- Community: Build your editor community like you’d build your brand. You’ll need to support this community, stay in close communication, and seek out feedback regarding pain points, feature requests, and other challenges and opportunities that may arise among your power users.
Decentralized content models work beautifully when they’re supported with intention. This prevents the inadvertent distribution of chaos across your web properties.
Build a Sustainable Training and Contributor Support System
Training isn’t optional, especially if your web team supports distributed content contributors. It’s the difference between a brand-aligned, accessible site and a digital free-for-all.
Here’s what we’ve seen work well:
- Practical CMS guides tailored to your setup. These can be in the form of short videos or lightweight documentation.
- Quick-start templates for content contributors. Look to your support queue for common CMS asks and frequent stumbling points for your user base. This will ensure you can address the issues that are vexing your user base and also let them know you’re focused on continuous improvement.
- Style and accessibility checklists. Even if your style guide is in early stages or your accessibility guidance doesn’t cover every WCAG guideline, start with what you have and build as you go.
- Ongoing refreshers. Think lunch-and-learns, active Slack or Teams CMS knowledge-sharing groups, or a regular “web best practices” newsletter for CMS users. Provide opportunities to upskill while fostering an active community of practice on your campus.
Real-world documentation should follow the same best practices as other content so it can be easily read, understood, and observed. It can be snappy and nimble, and delivered in the same tone and clarity you want to see reflected in your web content.
TL;DR: Build What You Need—No More, No Less
Your university’s web team doesn’t need to be huge. But it does need to be cleverly built in your campus reality: your CMS, your site, your people, and your capacity. Start with clarity, invest in training, and build the structure that makes a great website possible.
Need help figuring out what structure makes sense for your team?
Carnegie helps institutions of all sizes map the roles, training, and web governance they actually need to build and maintain a successful website. Let’s dig in together.
Frequently Asked Questions About Building a Higher Ed Web Team
How many people should be on a higher education web team?
There is no universal number. The right size depends on your CMS, site complexity, governance model, and content volume. What matters most is ensuring four core functions are covered: strategy, content, user experience/design, and development. In smaller institutions, one person may cover multiple functions. In larger institutions, these may be distributed across specialized roles.
What roles are essential for a successful university web team?
Every successful web team must account for:
- Strategic leadership aligned with institutional goals
- Content creation and optimization
- UX and design oversight
- Technical development and CMS support
Whether centralized or decentralized, these responsibilities must be clearly defined to prevent gaps or duplication.
Should higher education websites be centrally or decentrally managed?
Both models can work. Centralized governance creates consistency and control. Decentralized models increase agility and subject-matter expertise. The most effective approach defines clear guardrails, approval processes, and training structures so distributed contributors operate within a cohesive system.
How does governance improve website performance?
Governance clarifies ownership, approval workflows, standards, and expectations. Without it, websites become inconsistent, outdated, and difficult to maintain. Strong governance improves accessibility, brand consistency, SEO performance, and long-term sustainability.
How often should web contributors receive training?
Training should be ongoing, not one-time. Institutions benefit from:
- Initial CMS onboarding
- Accessibility and style refreshers
- Documentation updates
- Quarterly or semi-annual best-practice sessions
Ongoing training prevents content drift and strengthens distributed web communities.
When should an institution seek external web support?
External support can be helpful when:
- Your team lacks development resources
- Governance is unclear or difficult to enforce
- Accessibility compliance needs monitoring
- SEO and analytics insights are underutilized
- Your CMS requires optimization or reconfiguration
Carnegie partners with institutions to strengthen governance, improve accessibility, optimize content performance, and build sustainable web team structures that support long-term success.
