SCHOOL SPOTLIGHT
San Francisco University High School
Launching a New Website with a Student-Centered Story
San Francisco University High School (UHS) was entering an important period in its history.
The Bay Area school was celebrating its 50th anniversary, updating its visual identity, and looking ahead to its next chapter. Yet its website and messaging still reflected years of accumulated content, competing statements, and an older view of the modern institution.
When Ruth McDaniels joined UHS as director of communications, she quickly saw the gap between the school’s character and how it presented itself online.
At a Glance
Today, San Francisco University High School serves more than 500 students from over 50 ZIP codes. Its experienced faculty and staff support a diverse, evolving school community, while more than 5,000 alumni have gone on to lead and contribute across education, science, public service, the arts, business, and social impact.
The website contained a paragraph-long mission statement, a five-part vision, six values with several supporting points, an equity statement, eight community norms, and a separate financial aid mission statement, all of which appeared across the website, classrooms, and marketing materials.
While each message had been created with a noble purpose, they made it difficult for audiences to understand the one, central UHS story.
“There was so much messaging that it was overwhelming,” Ruth shared. “Every statement was trying to tell the story, but together, it was creating a lot of confusion.”
The website needed an overhaul, but a new design alone wouldn’t piece together a fragmented message. Before the UHS team selected layouts, colors, or interactive features for its website redesign, UHS would need to establish what it wanted families to really grasp and understand about the school.
“Building a website without doing your identity work is like building a house without a blueprint,” Ruth said. “You may end up with something beautiful, but it won’t necessarily function or tell the story well.”
The Challenge: Too many messages
Despite being one of the top private high schools in California, UHS was experiencing a challenge that many schools face.
Its brand needed an update, and the previous site had grown over time, with departments adding more and more pages and content to meet their immediate needs.
Each office had information it considered essential, but families didn’t necessarily need every detail on the public website. As content accumulated, the site became harder for families to navigate and more demanding for staff to maintain.
The team needed to determine:
- Which audiences the website should serve
- What prospective families needed to understand first
- Which information belonged on the site and which material belonged elsewhere
- Which pages could be removed, combined, or rewritten
- Who would have final authority over content and design decisions
A rebrand that can’t fix the site structure
The school’s former logo featured the façade of its main building, and while the image was recognizable, it didn’t reflect the inclusive, energetic, student-centered community UHS wanted to present.
Centered on the idea of “Many Voices, One University,” the brand was refreshed, and the logo reimagined with a series of “U” monograms to represent different paths, voices, and experiences coming together. A more vibrant red, stronger photography, and a visual system brought greater energy and flexibility, shifting the logo from the building to the people inside it.
As the team updated parts of the old website using its new brand assets, the appearance improved, but the underlying content, navigation, and page structure issues remained. With the school celebrating its 50th anniversary, the communications team saw the website as a way to honor its history while presenting a confident vision for the future.
“We realized that we still needed a full overhaul to achieve what we saw from the new brand and where our school was going,” Ruth said.
“Finalsite made it so easy. Our project manager and designer were so great."
RUTH McDANIELS
DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS
The Solution: Building institutional support before building pages
UHS approached the redesign as a collaborative school initiative with set ownership and accountability.
“The redesign begins with the shared recognition that the current site no longer serves the school as effectively as it should,” Ruth shared, and so the project became a strategic investment connected to enrollment, fundraising, reputation, and the student experience—not a collection of departmental requests.
The communications team gathered perspectives from leadership, trustees, parents, students, admissions, advancement, academics, and technology, each group bringing insight into the process and helping create confidence in the final decisions.
At the same time, Ruth and content and communications specialist Tara Teslow established project roles: stakeholders could contribute expertise and review relevant information, while the communications team retained authority over the website’s strategy, voice, design, and final content.
This balance helped the team avoid two common redesign problems: excluding important perspectives and allowing too many people to direct the finished product.
UHS used a structured RACI decision-making model to define who was responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed, and that clarity helped departments understand how they would participate and where final decisions would rest.
“Whatever decision-making model you use, or if you don’t use one, consider implementing one,” Ruth urged. “Having a decision-making model can be a game-changer.”
Starting with audience needs and a clean sitemap
One of the first steps was developing a new site architecture.
Finalsite encouraged UHS to narrow its content down to six to eight primary navigation areas, four to six utility navigation links, and a focused footer.
The task was intimidating at first. The existing website held roughly 150 pages, and beginning with a blank structure seemed daunting.
“That exercise required our team to look at the current website as a whole rather than automatically recreating its existing structure,” Ruth remembered.
The team divided the work, completing about one section per week. Admissions reviewed admissions content, alumni staff reviewed alumni pages, and academic departments reviewed program information.
This process gave stakeholders a meaningful role without asking them to become website designers or content administrators.
They reviewed every page and asked:
- Does this page still serve a clear purpose?
- Who is the intended audience?
- Is the public website the best channel?
- Can the school maintain the content over time?
By the end of the process, the team had reduced the site down to between 65 and 70 pages, cutting the page count by more than 50%. The result was a website with a clearer purpose, a simpler hierarchy, and less content for the communications team to maintain.
Creating a stronger system for finding school stories
UHS knew that a student-centered website would require a steady supply of authentic, meaningful stories.
The communications team couldn’t rely on students, faculty members, staff, or alumni to visit the office whenever something noteworthy happened—no school could. But many of the UHS’ most impactful stories were happening across its departments and communities without ever reaching communications.
So the team created simple forms that faculty, staff, students, alumni, and program leaders could use to nominate stories for the website, social media, or the school magazine.
The approach helped the team discover stories it might otherwise have missed, including a student with a large YouTube audience and an alumnus working as a senior art curator at the Museum of Modern Art.
“There are so many stories and achievements from students, alumni, faculty, and staff that we don’t even know about,” Ruth said, adding that the forms became part of a larger storytelling system that helped community members understand where to share news.
Giving the goals, not prescribing the design
The Finalsite partnership played a central role in taking the project from preparation to launch. UHS worked closely with its project manager and designer through regular meetings, discovery sessions, design reviews, site architecture planning, and content migration.
Ruth emphasized that the team felt comfortable asking for help whenever they encountered uncertainty or wanted to talk through a concept.
“Finalsite made it so easy,” Ruth said. “Our project manager and designer were so great. We had an open line of communication. We must have emailed her 10 times a week outside of our meetings,” she laughed. “We felt very supported, and if we were confused, we sought help, and she clarified right away."
The project’s discovery phase also allowed UHS to talk through its goals and challenges without having all the answers in advance.
“You don’t have to know what you want,” Ruth encouraged. “You have to share your story and say, ‘Here is what we don’t like about our current site.’ You’re sharing your problems with Finalsite, and they’re helping you solve them.”
When UHS entered the design phase, the team didn’t arrive with a rigid list of website components copied from other schools, either.
“We didn’t tell our Finalsite designer, ‘We want four cards that are all different colors.’ We said, ‘We want to show off our photography and our programs with concise language.’”
Ruth and Tara explained their goals to Finalsite’s designers and what the website needed to communicate:
- Vibrant photography and concise writing
- An adaptable and energetic visual experience with more movement
- Prominent student and community stories and statistics presented in an engaging way
- Design elements connected to the new “U” identity
- Pages that are easy to update and maintain
The new design emphasized vibrancy, adaptability, diverse voices, and the convergence of many user journeys. Movement was an important part of the design, as “dynamic” and “adaptable” were central ideas in the school’s new brand guide. But the site also expressed the new visual identity through the visitor experience, rather than relying on logos and colors alone.
After their initial design review, Ruth and Tara were struck by how closely the work matched their goals. “When the designer gave us the site after the first round and showed it to us, we were like, ‘It’s perfect. We’re done.’” The design was there, but a custom website still needs to be functional for a small communications team to edit and maintain.
Pairing custom design with manageable editing tools
Finalsite created branded components and page templates that Ruth and Tara could reuse across the site as it was built. They could drag, drop, copy, and adapt these elements while keeping the design consistent and on brand.
While the homepage was custom-designed, the team could select from approved layouts to build interior pages, adding hero photography, moving page elements, and customizing content without rebuilding the design each time.
“The Finalsite designer doesn’t come in and make every single page. They give you the components, and then you’re able to drag and drop.”
This balance gave UHS creative flexibility while protecting the new visual system.
The Launch
Choosing the right moment rather than a traditional deadline
While many schools plan website launches around the start of an academic year, UHS took a different approach. The team worked on the project during the school year and planned a February launch, slightly adjusting the public release to align more closely with admissions decisions.
“Not launching at the beginning of the school year gave us flexibility,” Ruth said, encouraging other schools to select a timeline that gives the team enough space for strategy and content.
“Don’t rush your prep work," she warned. “You can create a launch celebration day for your school when the time comes.”
The Results
San Francisco University High School’s experience shows that a successful website redesign starts well before the first design concept.
The redesigned website brought the school’s new brand, clarified messaging, stories, and program content into one cohesive experience, and shortly after launch, UHS’ new site earned Gold in the Vega Digital Awards, an international competition recognizing excellence in digital content.
Reducing the site led to a more purposeful content structure. Visitors now encounter fewer competing pages, a more focused navigation system, stronger visual hierarchy, and content written for the audience's needs.
Fewer pages to manage also meant fewer places where content can become outdated, duplicated, or inconsistent.
“We were trying to shift perceptions about our institution, which was known to be an elite and highly rigorous academic school,” Ruth said. “Knowing what you’re trying to accomplish—and not stopping at ‘our website looks bad’—is important. The Finalsite team is integral in helping you achieve this.”
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