Education · 2023
Getting an institute back in control of its own website
The institute had lost the credentials to its own hosting, domain and WordPress site, so nobody could update it and nobody could secure it. We replaced it with a site the staff control, and the student database WordPress was never going to give them.
- Years in production
- 3
- Unique visitors, last 30 days
- 4,800
- Students served
- 2,000+
The challenge
The old WordPress site was not merely dated, it was unusable. The login credentials had been lost, and with them access to the hosting and the domain, so no member of staff could change a word on it even if they wanted to. It was also carrying serious vulnerabilities, which on a site holding institutional and student information is not a maintenance problem but a risk one. Underneath all of that, the thing the institute most needed - somewhere to keep student records properly - was the one thing WordPress had never given it.
What we did
We rebuilt the public site from scratch on Laravel with TailwindCSS, to the institute's own design requirements and signed off by the authority, and built a separate student database application beside it on Laravel and Bootstrap. Cloudflare sits in front of both, for security and for cache. Two requirements drove most of the engineering. The database needed validation across a large number of fields, and every one of them had to accept Bangla Unicode properly - forms and stored records that work in the language the institute actually uses, which is a good deal more than a font choice. The site also had to satisfy the government's APA submission requirements, which dictate what gets published and in what form.
The outcome
It launched in 2023 and has run for three years without a complaint, still maintained by us. In the last thirty days it served 4,800 unique visitors and close to 95,000 requests, around 4GB of traffic: sustained use by an institute of two to three thousand students, rather than a site that was built and left.
Tell us what is not working
A thirty-minute call, no deck and no obligation. You will leave with a straight answer about whether this is worth building - including if that answer is no.