Overview
Universitas Advent Indonesia (UNAI) is a private Christian university run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church in West Bandung. Over several months I rebuilt its web presence piece by piece: the main site at unai.edu, the Faculty of Information Technology at fti.unai.edu, the Faculty of Economics and Business at fe.unai.edu, the admissions portal at pmb.unai.edu and the news portal at news.unai.edu.
They are five sites, but I treated them as one project. A visitor moving from a news story to a faculty page to the registration form should feel they never left the same university.
The challenge
A university website is asked to do everything at once. Recruit students. Inform current ones. Prove accreditation. Publish news. Route people to a dozen other systems.
Over the years UNAI's sites had grown into a maze. First-time visitors could not find admissions information, students had to dig for the links they used every day, and each faculty's strongest arguments were buried in sub-pages. News either cluttered pages meant for admissions or vanished into social feeds. Admissions itself still leaned on forms and phone calls.
And whatever replaced all of this had to be run by university staff, not by me.
Approach
Split every page by audience. The top of each site is for daily users: a quick-access bar to Moodle, journals, lecturer and student portals and SISTER, with "Daftar Sekarang" (Apply Now) and the e-brochure in the header. A student who opens a UNAI site just to reach Moodle is there in one click. Everything below the bar is for people still deciding: prospective students and parents get the story, the programs and the proof.
One system, not five designs. The quick-access bar, the navigation patterns, the admissions entry points and a footer linking every faculty and university system are shared across all of the sites. FTI was the first one I built, and its structure became the pattern for the rest. Staff who learn one site can work on any of them.
Match the tool to the job. The content sites run on WordPress, because many people across the university publish news and documents and they should not wait on a developer. Admissions runs on Laravel, because it is less about pages and more about state.
The main site
The front door, built for two audiences. The menu was rebuilt around what each audience is looking for rather than around the university's org chart: About, Admissions, Academics, Students, Research and Life@UNAI. Below the quick-access bar, a storytelling home page walks prospective students and parents through campus life, programs, the rector's welcome, news and testimonials, with an event calendar tagged by faculty or unit.
The faculty sites
A faculty site is really four sites sharing one URL: prospective students want a reason to enroll, current students want their tools, accreditation reviewers want quality documents and parents want reassurance.
So proof goes up front. On FTI, both programs hold "Unggul" (Excellent) accreditation from LAMINFOKOM, students can earn certifications through on-campus academies (Adobe, AWS, Alibaba, MikroTik, Oracle and Cisco) and alumni work at well-known tech companies. All of that sits on the home page, not three levels deep. On FE, the home page leads with what makes the faculty different: a residential campus, professional certifications alongside the degree and ERP use in teaching. SPMI (internal quality assurance) got a top-level menu slot on purpose, because accreditation documents should never be hard to find.
Admissions
"Admissions" sounds like one process. At UNAI it is five: Indonesian high-school graduates, international students, Paket C graduates, transfer students and RPL candidates each follow a different path.
The form branches early. The first question is not your name but who you are, so each applicant only sees the levels, programs and fields that apply to them. A visual six-step flow shows the whole journey before it starts (account, application form, fee, TPA entrance test, personal data, documents), a stepper shows where you are, and applicants check their exam result in the same place they applied.
News
UNAI News is built as a newsroom, not a blog. A latest-news ticker and an "All News" feed lead the home page because freshness is the point. Every format the communications team produces gets its own home: articles, LPPM research news, the university's video series, photo stories and the "UNAI News and Views" magazine archive.
What I built
- unai.edu: reorganized navigation, quick-access bar, storytelling home page, event calendar and a footer that ties the whole UNAI web together.
- fti.unai.edu and fe.unai.edu: program pages, selling-point home pages, certification academies, alumni testimonials and quality documents.
- pmb.unai.edu: information pages, a six-step registration flow, a branching multi-step form and exam results.
- news.unai.edu: news feed and categories, video programs, photo news, magazine archive and newsletter sign-up.
- Indonesian and English versions across the sites.
Outcome
UNAI now has one coherent web presence instead of a collection of separate websites. Daily users reach their tools from the top bar on any site, prospective students get the full story and a registration path that fits them, the faculties lead with their real strengths, and the communications team publishes on its own schedule. Staff run all of it themselves.