The University of Oxford has launched a completely redesigned website, created by Leeds digital agency Numiko, as part of one of the most ambitious digital transformation programmes in UK higher education.
Alongside the new www.ox.ac.uk site, Numiko has designed a comprehensive system that will bring a unified digital experience to the university’s vast estate of over 800 websites, spanning colleges, museums, galleries, and research centres.
The redesigned www.ox.ac.uk pushes the University’s digital brand in a new direction, balancing Oxford’s deep heritage with a modern, accessible design. The new site serves the University’s key audiences: prospective students, the global research community, and funders, with a clean, intuitive layout that makes critical information easy to find.
Central to the approach was designing for accessibility and clarity from day one, ensuring the site works for everyone who needs it, not just those who already know where to look.
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Oxford’s wider digital landscape had grown piecemeal over decades. Hundreds of websites, from the Ashmolean Museum to individual colleges and cutting-edge research projects. Each operated with their own design, creating an inconsistent experience. The new design system allows Oxford to address this at scale, establishing a shared UX language across the entire estate.
Crucially, the system is built around flexibility. Content teams across Oxford can express their institution’s identity, while core interaction patterns such as buttons, navigation, search, filters etc. behave consistently throughout. The result is a digital estate where every site feels unmistakably part of Oxford, yet each retains its own character.
Daniel Wilson, head of design at Numiko and the lead designer for the project said: “A design system isn’t just a library of components, it’s a way of working. When you get it right, teams stop rebuilding the basics and start spending their energy on the things that actually matter. With Oxford, we designed something that gives over 800 websites a shared foundation, but still leaves room for each institution to make it their own.”
The system has been designed to evolve over time as new components and requirements emerge. It provides the University of Oxford with strong foundations as it continues to evolve its digital presence.
The project also broke new ground in addressing emerging priorities in digital design.
Numiko engaged proactively with long-term sustainability considerations in both design and hosting, as well as Oxford’s developing approaches to the use of AI across its digital estate. Notably, the project enabled the University of Oxford to drastically cut the carbon emissions associated with hosting its digital estate, by switching its hosting location to take advantage of abundant renewable energy in Sweden, where the grid is ten times less carbon intensive than its previous hosting location.
Liz McCarthy, deputy director and head of content and digital communications at the University of Oxford, said: “I’ve really enjoyed working with Numiko on what’s been an incredibly complex digital transformation programme. The team has consistently been knowledgeable, pragmatic and responsive. I’ve particularly appreciated Numiko’s engagement with emerging priorities like long-term sustainability considerations in design and hosting or our approaches to and use of AI.”
