Career College Website Design in Ontario
Under section 15 of O. Reg. 415/06 a career college’s website is an advertisement, and the regulation that follows sets out what it must contain, what it may never claim, how long you have to keep a copy of it, and what each mistake costs per day. That decides the order the work gets done in, so here is the order I use.
Seven steps. The two in amber are set by the Act and the regulation, not by me — they come first because everything after them depends on the wording being right.
Fix the name
The advertisement has to carry the operating or business name registered under the Business Names Act, or the legal name if there is none. Decide it once, use it everywhere.
Subtract the claims the regulation does not allow
Nothing that misleads, guarantees a place, promises a job or hints at an immigration outcome — in copy, images or video. Done before design, not after.
One page per approved program
Hours, credential, delivery format, admission route, the itemised fee, and the approval sentence where it applies. This is where search lands.
Separate the courses that are not vocational programs
Mixing them with approved programs triggers a prescribed disclaimer. Easier to give them their own section than to write the sentence on every card.
Publish the outcomes, labelled
Graduation, employment, employment in the field, graduate and employer satisfaction. Each with its year and its source, because two of them look alike and are not.
Put the fees on the page
The Superintendent publishes them anyway. A program page without a number sends the applicant to a government site to find it.
Build the application path last
Program, start date, admission route. Short enough to finish on a phone, and specific enough that the first reply is not a list of questions.
What should a career college website include?
Seven things: a home page under the registered name, a page for each approved vocational program, a separate treatment of courses that are not vocational programs, a published and labelled outcomes page, an itemised fee and refund page, the student rights and complaint route, and an application path that captures the program and the start date.
Each of those pages exists because a specific provision expects that information to be available, which is why I keep them apart: combine two and the result answers neither properly. The table below is the version I work from.
| Page | What it has to answer | The rule behind it |
|---|---|---|
| Home | Who you are, under the name on the registration | Reg. s. 16 (1) para. 1 |
| Program pages | Hours, credential, delivery format, admission route, full fee | Reg. s. 16 (1) paras. 4 and 6; ss. 43–44 |
| Non-vocational courses | That these sit outside the Act, in the prescribed words | Reg. s. 16 (1) para. 5 |
| Outcomes | The performance indicators, each one labelled and dated | Act s. 26 |
| Fees and refunds | Every fee itemised, and what a withdrawal returns | Reg. s. 43 and ss. 24–33 |
| Student rights | The complaint route, before anyone signs | Act ss. 31 and 32 |
| Apply | Program, start date, admission route | Reg. s. 19 |
Sources: Ontario Career Colleges Act, 2005 and O. Reg. 415/06, General, read on e-Laws 19 September 2026. Written to plan a website, not as legal advice.
Which Ontario rules shape a career college website?
Three groups of them. One decides who may advertise at all, one supplies the wording and bans four specific claims, and one requires the college to keep a copy of every advertisement for a year afterwards. A fourth provision, section 26 of the Act, is the reason an outcomes page exists at all.
Who may advertise
Section 11 of the Act: no person shall advertise a career college unless registered, and no person shall advertise a vocational program unless registered and the program approved by the Superintendent.
Section 11 (4) goes further — the words “career college”, or any derivation of them, may not be used in advertising by anyone who is not registered.
Act, s. 11
What it must and must not say
Section 16 (1) of the regulation sets six requirements: the registered name; no misleading, guaranteeing or immigration-implying claim in text, image or video; the exact registration sentence; the exact approval sentence; a prescribed disclaimer on non-vocational courses; and the language of instruction where it is neither English nor French.
Reg. s. 16 (1)
What you have to keep
Section 17 requires a copy of each advertisement for one year after its last publication — the text, any image or video in a viewable format, the dates, a translation where it ran in another language, and signed records behind testimonials, regulator recognition and transfer-credit claims.
A website changes more often than a printed advertisement does, so the retained record has to be kept version by version.
Reg. s. 17
Behind all three sits Table 1 of the regulation, which prices contraventions: $1,000 for section 11 and for the banned claims, $750 for the wording requirements, $250 for the advertising records and $250 for failing to make the performance indicators public. Section 51 (2) doubles, triples and quadruples the amount for repeats within three years, and section 51 (3) multiplies it by the number of successive days a contravention continues. A published page keeps running until somebody changes it, which is why the wording pass comes before the design pass on this kind of build.
The ministry publishes what happens next. Its compliance file holds 599 enforcement actions against 358 institutions, 78.0 per cent of them against institutions that were not registered at all, and $3,248,766 in penalties across the 269 records that carry a dollar figure. The Scarborough page goes through a 2026 decision in which $24,000 of a $41,000 penalty was for advertising through a website, counted at $1,000 a day for 24 days.
Sources: O. Reg. 415/06, Part V and Table 1; and the Ministry of Colleges and Universities file Career college compliance notices and enforcement actions (dated 10 September 2026, counted 19 September 2026).
What training and education work have I done?
I have not built a career college website. The closest work is a youth soccer academy in Toronto that I designed and hand-coded, with structured program pages, schedules and online registration — the same enrolment decision a prospective student makes, without the statute sitting on top of it.
The programs-and-registration build
UFootball Soccer Academy runs youth training programs across Toronto and the GTA. The site presents age groups, schedules, coaching and locations as structured pages a parent can scan, and the registration path is integrated rather than bolted on, so interest turns into a sign-up without a phone call.
That is the transferable part. A career college applicant is doing the same job as that parent — comparing start dates, levels, locations and cost — and leaves the same way when a program page will not tell them the schedule or the price.
Read the soccer academy case study, or the related builds for soccer academies, daycares and child care and driving schools.
I would rather say that plainly than describe a training business as a career college. What I bring to a college build is the enrolment funnel done properly, plus a reading of the Act and the regulation that decides what goes on the page before anything is designed. The rest of the trades are on the industries page, and what a build involves is on the web design page.
Career college web design by city
Each city page is written from the province’s own records for that district — how many campuses are there, what they are approved to teach, and where they sit.
What does a career college website cost?
A build of this scope is $899 to $2,999 one time and goes live in 5 to 7 days once content is ready. The number of approved programs that each need their own page is the variable that moves it most, because every program page carries its own fee list, admission route and credential.
If you already have a site, the free website audit shows what an applicant cannot find on it, and on a college site that first read doubles as a pass over the wording. For the listing that appears beside the site when someone searches a program and a neighbourhood, see Google Maps setup. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.
Common questions
What should a career college website include?+
A home page carrying the registered name, one page per approved vocational program with its hours, credential, delivery format, admission route and full fee, a separate treatment for courses that are not vocational programs, a published outcomes page, an itemised fee and refund page, the student rights and complaint route, and an application path that captures the program and the start date.
Does Ontario regulate what a career college puts on its website?+
Yes. Section 15 of O. Reg. 415/06 defines an advertisement as one distributed or transmitted by any means including the internet, so section 11 of the Ontario Career Colleges Act, 2005 and the content rules in section 16 of the regulation apply to the website itself, not only to print and broadcast advertising.
What has to appear on a career college program page?+
The registered operating or business name of the college, the prescribed approval sentence if the page says the program is approved, the language of instruction if it is neither English nor French, the admission requirements, and the itemised fee. None of it may guarantee admission, completion, employment or an immigration outcome.
How long must a career college keep its website advertising?+
One year after the last publication, under section 17 (1) of O. Reg. 415/06. The record includes the text, any image or video in a viewable format, the dates it ran, a translation where the advertisement was not in English or French, and signed backing for any testimonial, accreditation or transfer-credit claim.
Does a career college have to publish its results?+
Section 26 of the Act requires every career college to make public the information the Superintendent’s policy directives require about performance indicators and objectives. The province collects six: graduation rate, graduate employment rate, employment in the field of study, graduate satisfaction, employer satisfaction and the OSAP default rate.
How much does a career college website cost?+
A build of this scope is $899 to $2,999 one time and goes live in 5 to 7 days once content is ready. The number of approved programs needing their own page is the variable that moves it most, because each program page carries its own fee list, admission route and credential.
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