St Mary's University, Twickenham chooses Contensis for its new website

We're pleased to share that St Mary's University, Twickenham has chosen Contensis for its new external website, following an open, competitive tender.

St Mary's has used Contensis since 2016, and the new project will bring its external website onto a single, modern Contensis platform. Contensis will power and host the new website, and our services team will deliver discovery, design, the front-end build, testing and training, with launch planned for November 2027.

Founded in 1850, St Mary's is one of the oldest higher education institutions in the country. It gained full university status in 2014 and has ambitious plans for the future, including a new School of Medicine that began training doctors this year.

The new website will support the University's strategic goals in student recruitment, engagement and brand positioning. St Mary's wants a modern, accessible and user-centred experience that works for a wide range of audiences – prospective home, international, postgraduate and short-course students, parents, teachers and advisors, commercial clients and business partners, and alumni and the wider community.

The brief puts particular weight on personalised content and marketing automation. The University wants to show each visitor the most relevant information for them, and to connect the website more closely with its recruitment and marketing activity.

Integration is another priority for St Mary’s. The new website will need to work smoothly with the systems the University relies on, including CRM, course data and event booking, so that information flows reliably between the website and the tools behind it.

The University also wants improved governance, analytics and performance, along with a flexible, intuitive and secure editing experience for the staff who manage its content day to day.

St Mary's ran a full, open procurement for its next website, so the decision came down to how well each platform and partner met its requirements. As an existing customer, the University already knows how Contensis works in practice, and our team knows its digital estate, its brand and the people behind its website.

Bringing the external website onto a single, modern Contensis platform will give editors one consistent experience and a stronger base for the features the University wants to grow into. Contensis supports personalisation component by component, so a single landing page can show different calls to action, testimonials or news to a prospective international student than it does to a home applicant.

Its API-first architecture keeps content, presentation and integrations cleanly separated, which makes it straightforward to connect the CRM, course data, event booking and other systems the University depends on, and to add more as its needs evolve.

St Mary's is the third UK university to choose Contensis through a competitive tender in 2026, alongside the University of Leicester and the University of Wolverhampton

The project is now under way, starting with a discovery phase covering user research, an audit of existing content and stakeholder engagement. Our team will then move into design, including wireframes, prototypes and a new design system, followed by development, testing and training.

The new website is due to launch in November 2027, with post-launch support to follow. The University's staff and student portals sit outside this project.

After launch, the contract will run for an operational period of three years for hosting and licensing, with the option to extend by up to two further years.

Richard Chivers, CEO of Zengenti, said "St Mary's has been a Contensis customer for 10 years, so being chosen again through an open tender means a great deal to the whole team. The University tested the market properly and set a high bar around personalisation, marketing automation and integration with the systems its teams rely on. We already know their estate and their team, which will give us a head start in discovery. Bringing everything onto modern Contensis will give St Mary's a single platform to grow with, and we're excited to help build a website that matches the ambition behind projects like the new School of Medicine."

Beth Hayes, Director of Marketing & Communications at St Mary’s, said of the project “This redevelopment is an opportunity to create a more accessible, intuitive, and personalised experience for our audiences. Following a competitive tender process, we’re looking forward to continuing working with Zengenti to develop a website that reflects St Mary’s ambitions and supports our future growth."

We're looking forward to the next chapter of our work with the team at St Mary's.