From Scattered to Streamlined: Restructuring a College Billing Website

When I was assigned to restructure a local college’s billing website, I didn’t expect it to become one of the most meaningful projects of my time there. Billing websites aren’t exactly glamorous. But when a website has grown over time and students are struggling to find what they need, that’s a vital problem that needs to be solved thoughtfully.

Here’s how I approached it.

Understanding the Situation

The billing team had noticed a pattern: students were calling with questions that were technically already answered on the website. The information was there, but it wasn’t easy to act on. After spending time with the existing site, I could see why. Like many institutional websites, the billing section had grown organically over the years. Related content lived on separate pages. The same information appeared in multiple places, worded slightly differently. Long text-heavy pages made it hard to scan quickly. It was clear that in an effort to make information more accessible, it had become oversaturated.

Starting with People, Not Pages

Before I touched a single page, my team and I sat down with the billing team and asked them what they were experiencing. Their answer was telling; it felt like students weren’t reading the website. They spent time sending out links and explaining processes. In my experience, that usually means the website isn’t making it easy enough to find what you need quickly and feel confident acting on it. We also had a student do a quick review of the site. Interestingly, they could navigate it, but the billing team was still fielding the same questions. That gap told me something important: the content was findable but not clear enough for students to self-serve without second-guessing themselves.

Mapping the Content

Once I had a clear picture of the problem, I audited every page. I used affinity mapping to group content by topic and built a new sitemap based on how students would actually approach billing tasks rather than how the content had historically been organized. The patterns that emerged were helpful, three separate pages covered billing schedules and processes, multiple standalone instruction pages explained how to log in and make payments, and two different refund processes lived side by side with no clear distinction between them. The goal wasn’t to reduce page count for its own sake. It was to make sure every page had a clear purpose and that related information lived together.

Presenting to the Web Team

Before the billing team ever saw a revised version, I presented my proposed restructure to my supervisor and a senior team member during two sessions. Their feedback sharpened the work considerably. They caught structural decisions that needed rethinking, flagged grammar and link description issues, and pointed out spacing inconsistencies I had stopped seeing after spending so much time with the content. That kind of detailed peer review is something I genuinely value. It’s easy to get too close to your own work, and having experienced colleagues push back on your decisions makes the final product stronger.

Building It in Stages

Rather than making changes directly to the live site, I created a staging version of the billing section and rebuilt it there. This gave the billing team something concrete to review without any risk to the live site. We went through three rounds of revisions over the course of about a year with a three-month break in the middle where I shifted focus to other projects before the new site was ready to publish.

Each round of revisions tightened the content further. I rewrote instructions for clarity, removed redundant language, consolidated related pages, and made as much content evergreen as possible so it wouldn’t need constant updating. Throughout the process, I kept coming back to one question: if a student landed on this page for the first time, would they know exactly what to do next?

The Results

The restructure brought meaningful clarity to the billing section. Here’s what changed:

• 3 billing schedule and process pages consolidated into 1
• Multiple scattered login and payment instruction pages combined into 1 task-focused page with accordion navigation
• 2 refund pages reorganized into 2 clearly distinguished pages — one for withdrawal refunds, one for credit balance refunds
• An expanded FAQ brought troubleshooting content and common questions into one central location

After publishing, I identified pages that needed redirects from old URLs to new ones so that any bookmarked or linked pages would still reach the right destination. I also set recurring reminders for time-sensitive content, like due dates and annual announcements, so the site would stay current without requiring a full audit each year.

What I Took Away

This project reinforced something I believe strongly. Content problems are usually people problems in disguise. The billing team wasn’t struggling because the information didn’t exist. They were struggling because the website wasn’t organized around the people using it. Fixing that required listening first and editing second.