Vote for us in the Webbys

We are flattered that our little website - launched last September, and designed and developed in collaboration with the brilliant agency Bond & Coyne - has just been shortlisted for a Webby award.

The Webbys recognise the best in website, email and social design across the world. This year they received 13,000 entries.

HCA is the only UK institution shortlisted in the School/University category, and joins projects from Stanford and Harvard on a five-entry list.

We are also competing in for two of the Internet's most-coveted awards, The Webby Award and The Webby People's Voice Award. The latter includes a public vote, and you can lend us your support by taking a few minutes to follow the instructions below.

Voting closes 17 April, with the winners announced on 12 May.

The new HCA site launched in September 2025, following more than six months' of consultation and collaboration with staff and students.

That process was key to ensuring Bond & Coyne understood what made the college unique.

It also meant that the design process could build in input from some of the incredible creatives teaching and studying at the college.

1 / ACCESSIBILE

We wanted our new site to meet and exceed accessibility standards. The college is passionate about providing access to outstanding arts education to as many people as possible. We wanted to design a site that worked for everyone. The final design went through a strict testing process to ensure it meets all the standards laid out in WCAG 2.1.

2 / PERSONAL

The majority of HCA's website users are visting the site for the first time. For many of them, this will be their first time finding out about HCA in depth. We wanted exploring our new site enjoyable and personal to them.

You can search for courses based on what tools or materials you like to you use. You can 'Like' pages that are saved down to your own personal Favourites. You can draw over the homepage, and swipe through a deck of student stories.

3 / CRAFTED

As an institution that teaches design, it was really important that our new site met a high level of design quality.

We reduced and refined the menu navigation and took a cleaner approach to page design. We wanted the user to be able to find what was important to them, and we wanted the important things to stand out.

The result is a site that scores above 70% for engagement rate across 95% of pages - qualifying as Excellent in Google's scoring of pages.

Much of this also happened behind-the-scenes, as the development team also produced a coded and designed to showcase rich visual content without comprimising on load-speed.