European School of Business and Diplomacy

An institution's website is its admissions funnel. If enrolling means downloading a PDF and emailing it back, you lose people at every step. If the site is slow, the ones you lose are the ones on mobile data.

ESBD's site was hand-written HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It worked, in the sense that it loaded, but every change meant editing markup by hand, there was no component structure to build on, and nothing about it was going to support an online admissions flow.

I rebuilt the foundation. That meant moving it onto React and a modern toolchain, establishing the component architecture, and restructuring the site so the things the institution actually needed were possible: an enrollment process a prospective student could finish in one sitting, content that academic and administrative staff could publish without going through a developer, and a structure search engines could read properly.

What I did and didn't do

I took it from one state to a substantially better one and set the direction. The architecture, the migration and the foundational code are mine.

It's since been handed to another developer, who maintains it and ships the ongoing changes. So the site as it stands today isn't purely my work, and I'd rather say that than let a live URL imply otherwise.

The part that isn't in the stack list: most of a job like this is collaboration. Academic teams and administrative teams want different things from the same page, and the work is getting to a version that serves both, then leaving it in a state someone else can pick up cleanly.