Services/industries/Education

Schools & Research1+ clients

Education

University web, research-platform tooling, and recruiting funnels for educational institutions — built to ship inside official brand frameworks without losing engineering velocity. EVOLVE at UA, four UA WordPress sites refreshed, and adjacent K-12 work.

11industries/education.ts

our_take_on_education

University marketing operates inside guardrails most agencies can’t navigate — brand systems, accessibility mandates, central comms approvals, and the institutional WordPress framework every site has to live inside. We’ve been there: four UA sites refreshed without leaving the official framework, plus the EVOLVE research platform built from scratch on the agentic development stack for the Alabama Mobility & Power Center. Brand consistency, accessibility-first, and the ability to ship inside the constraints — without grinding to a halt every time central comms wants a review.

whats_broken_here

Common challenges.

01
Institutional framework constraints — university WordPress installs that can't be replaced. Brand systems that can't be deviated from. Engineering velocity dies inside them.
02
Accessibility as a remediation pass — WCAG conformance treated as a final-stage audit instead of a design constraint. Sites fail the students they're built to serve.
03
Research-platform gaps — labs and centers needing custom tools, getting quoted six-figure enterprise contracts for what should be a focused agentic build.
04
Recruiting funnel competing with peers — every department running the same playbook, none of them differentiating, all of them quietly losing committed prospects to peer institutions.

how_we_work_in_education

Our channels applied here.

Agentic Development

Research platforms, data-driven tools, and custom apps for centers and departments. EVOLVE for UA is the canonical example — EV-adoption forecasting SaaS shipped on the agentic stack.

Content Engineering

Editorial systems that work inside institutional frameworks. Recruiting content workflows for departments competing for committed prospects.

SEO / AEO

Program-page SEO so prospective students find the right department. Faculty-bio schema. Research-publication AEO so answer engines cite the institution.

Paid Performance

Recruiting campaigns measured against applications submitted, not landing-page views. Donor and community-engagement funnels for centers and foundations.

how_an_engagement_runs

A typical engagement.

PHASE 01

Framework + brand audit

Map the institutional constraints — brand system, official CMS, central comms review path. Identify what we can change, what we have to live inside.

week 1

PHASE 02

Inside-the-guardrails design

Modernized visual treatments and structural patterns that read current without violating the brand book. Accessibility built in from the first wireframe.

weeks 2–4

PHASE 03

Build + migration

Content moves cleanly — pages, assets, redirects. Editors land on the new platform able to do day-to-day work without a learning curve. For custom platforms: prototype, harden, deploy.

weeks 5–10

PHASE 04

Tending

Ongoing care — model drift on agentic platforms, content updates, accessibility maintenance. The work doesn't stop at launch.

ongoing

what_success_looks_like

SaaS

EVOLVE_platform

EV-adoption forecasting SaaS for the University of Alabama, agentic build.

4 sites

UA_refreshed

Modernized inside the official UA WordPress framework — brand intact.

WCAG AA

accessibility_floor

The bar on every educational build we ship, not a remediation pass.

questions_we_get

Honest answers.

Can you work inside our official CMS / framework?

Yes — we’ve done this at scale for UA. Four sites refreshed inside the official WordPress framework, brand intact, central comms approving. The constraint is the design problem, not a blocker.

Can you build custom platforms for research centers?

Yes — EVOLVE is the canonical example. EV-adoption forecasting SaaS for the Alabama Mobility & Power Center, built on the agentic development stack. The economics versus enterprise research-tool vendors are dramatic.

How do you handle accessibility?

WCAG AA is the floor on every site, not a final-pass remediation. Education is the category where accessibility isn't optional. Components are accessible by default; deviations are documented exceptions, not the norm.

Can you handle the central-comms review process?

Yes. We design review into the workflow — structured drafts, change-tracking, defined approval stages. Reviewers approve faster because they're seeing complete drafts instead of in-progress work.

Ready to put The Nine to work in Education?

next_step

~$nine init --audit

Start with an Insight Genesis audit. Six weeks. Fixed scope. A written diagnosis of where your marketing actually stands — plus a working agent prototype tailored to your business.

Start an audit→↵Book a discovery call⌘ B