Project Website Requirements for Horizon Europe Dissemination: A Practical Checklist

The practical answer

A Horizon Europe project website should prove, in plain public view, that the consortium is communicating the project, sharing results, acknowledging EU funding, and keeping a usable record of outputs. The practical requirement is not a fancy site. It is a maintained evidence base for dissemination, exploitation, reporting, and trust.

Treat the website as part of the dissemination work package, not as a one-off launch task. It needs an owner, an update rhythm, and a simple content model that survives partner changes. A good project site answers four jobs:

Explain the problem, method, expected results, and public value.
Show the consortium, coordinator, funding source, and contact point.
Publish news, events, deliverables, publications, media, and other outputs.
Give reviewers and stakeholders a clean trail of what happened during the project.

Horizon Europe has supported 23278 projects in the 2014-2027 data we track across EU programmes. That volume matters because stakeholders, evaluators, journalists, policy teams, and future partners see many similar projects. Your website does not need to shout. It needs to be clear, current, and easy to cite.

Core pages every project site should have

Start with a small site map. Most projects need fewer pages than they think. The risk is usually not missing decoration. The risk is burying the official story, outputs, and funding acknowledgement under scattered news posts.

Build these pages first:

Home: one sentence on what the project does, who it serves, and why it matters. Add the EU emblem and funding acknowledgement in the visible page area.
About: objectives, work packages in plain language, expected results, project dates if already public, and the programme context.
Partners: coordinator first, then partners with official names, countries, and short roles. Link to partner websites when useful.
Results: deliverables, publications, tools, datasets, policy briefs, videos, and reusable materials. Mark draft, submitted, accepted, and public items clearly.
News and events: meeting reports, stakeholder sessions, conference appearances, webinars, pilots, and training.
Contact: role-based email, press or dissemination contact, and social channels if active.
Privacy and accessibility: especially if you collect registrations, newsletter signups, analytics, or feedback.

Keep the menu stable. Reviewers should not have to guess where a deliverable, event recording, or public report lives.

Compliance, visibility, and evidence

Your website should follow the grant agreement, the call text, the project communication plan, and the European Commission guidance on visibility. Use the official EU emblem correctly, include the funding statement, and avoid wording that suggests Commission endorsement unless that wording is explicitly approved. The Funding and Tenders Portal is the safest starting point for current programme documents: European Commission Funding and Tenders Portal.

Make each public output easy to verify. For each deliverable or result, add a title, short summary, date, version, authors or lead partner, access status, and file format. If an item cannot be public, publish a short public description where allowed. If the project later appears on CORDIS, consistent titles and descriptions make the public record easier to connect.

Keep an evidence folder behind the site. Save screenshots of major pages, event announcements, agendas, recordings, participant materials, social cards, newsletters, and press mentions. The website is the public layer. Your archive is the reporting layer. Together they reduce panic before reviews.

Accessibility is also part of quality. Use readable contrast, descriptive link text, captions where possible, alt text for meaningful images, and documents that are not scanned images. A beautiful PDF that nobody can search or read with assistive technology is a poor dissemination asset.

Content operations during the project

The website fails when everyone assumes someone else will update it. Put website operations into the dissemination work package from the start. Name one editorial owner, one technical owner, and one approval backup. Then define what partners must send after events, deliverables, stakeholder meetings, pilots, and publications.

Use a light publishing workflow:

Partner sends a short item with title, date, location or format, summary, links, and media consent status.
Editorial owner checks clarity, funding acknowledgement, names, and claims.
Technical owner publishes, tests links, and stores the evidence copy.
Coordinator reviews sensitive items before publication, especially policy claims or preliminary findings.

Create reusable templates for news, event pages, deliverables, partner profiles, and resources. Templates speed up publication and make the project look coherent even when many partners contribute.

Do not wait for perfect results. Publish steady progress when it is meaningful: kick-off, stakeholder mapping, advisory board meetings, pilot preparation, methodology notes, public consultations, and training materials. These updates show that the consortium is active. They also help future participants understand where they can engage.

For multilingual projects, decide early what must be translated and what can stay in English. Translate calls to action, participant-facing pages, event information, and key outputs when local engagement depends on them.

Build choices that reduce risk

Choose a platform your consortium can operate after the launch supplier leaves. A project website is usually active for the full project period and often needs to remain online after final reporting. That means boring strengths matter: backups, security updates, editor permissions, redirects, accessible templates, and exportable content.

Before building, decide:

Who owns the domain and hosting account.
Who can publish without developer help.
How documents are named, versioned, and archived.
How analytics, cookies, newsletter tools, and forms are handled.
What happens to the site after the project ends.

Avoid locking core content inside page builders that only one supplier can maintain. Avoid custom features unless they serve a real dissemination need. If the project needs a stakeholder area, event registration, knowledge base, or AI assistant with cited answers, make that a planned digital component rather than an add-on bolted to the public website.

StrandsUnited designs and operates these project platforms, from public websites to member areas and knowledge systems, for EU cooperation projects and communities. If your consortium is still shaping the dissemination work package, the next step is to turn the checklist into a content model, owner map, and launch plan. Our overview of digital project platforms is here: what we do.

Where this comes from

This checklist comes from our day-to-day work operating community platforms, including Impactful, and building knowledge systems for EU cooperation teams. We also maintain our consortium graph and grant intelligence engine, which connects CORDIS and Erasmus+ open data across 83490 projects, 114731 organisations, and 461953 participation links. That view keeps the advice practical: a good project website is not a brochure, it is the public operating record of the consortium.