Website Design
Four weeks. 91% faster. Record admissions growth.
Gheorghe Asachi Technical University of Iasi — TUIASI — is one of Romania’s oldest and most respected technical universities. But its website told a completely different story.
The site was over a decade old. Pages loaded slowly, navigation was buried five levels deep, and the design belonged to an era when university websites were basically digital brochures. The CMS had been patched and extended so many times that even simple updates needed a developer.
Then came the catalyst: the President of Romania announced a visit to the university — in four weeks. The administration needed the website to reflect the institution’s actual quality and ambition, not years of digital neglect. Four weeks to redesign a site serving prospective students, current students, faculty, researchers, alumni, and the media.
On top of the deadline:
With four weeks on the clock, we had to be ruthless about scope. Phase 1 targeted the public-facing experience — pages a visiting dignitary, prospective student, or journalist would actually see.
We rebuilt the layout on CSS Grid, replacing table-based layouts and float hacks from the original. That single change enabled responsive behavior across all screen sizes and dramatically simplified the codebase.
The university’s official colors were extracted and organized into a functional palette. Primary blues for navigation and headers, accent golds for calls to action, neutral grays for content backgrounds, semantic colors for alerts and status indicators. The palette was documented with accessibility ratios to prevent the contrast failures all over the old design.
Five levels collapsed to two. Primary navigation covers the university’s main audiences: Prospective Students, Current Students, Research, About, and Contact. Secondary level gives direct access to faculties and key services. Everything else is reachable through search or contextual links within content pages.
Page weight dropped from 14MB to 1.3MB — a 91% reduction. Images compressed and served in modern formats. Unused CSS and JavaScript stripped out. Web fonts subset to only the characters actually used. The result was a 10x speed improvement, transforming the mobile experience from unusable to instant.
The emergency redesign launched on time, two days before the presidential visit.
With the crisis handled, Phase 2 tackled the deeper structural work that would serve the university for years.
We studied websites from leading European technical universities — TU Delft, ETH Zurich, KTH Stockholm — to understand best practices for academic web experiences. Common patterns emerged: audience-first navigation, research visibility, streamlined admissions funnels.
The old site mirrored the university’s administrative structure — departments, offices, committees. We reorganized everything around what users actually want to do:
Each journey was mapped end-to-end, with every page answering a question and pointing toward the next logical step.
TUIASI serves both Romanian and international students, so we designed full bilingual support in Romanian and English. This wasn’t a translation layer bolted on top — the information architecture was adapted for each audience, recognizing that international students have different questions, different entry points, and different decision criteria.
Content was structured so Romanian and English versions share the same CMS entries, cutting maintenance burden and making sure updates hit both languages at once.
The 11+ faculty sites were brought under a single design system with flexible templates. Each faculty keeps its identity through color accents and hero imagery, but shares navigation patterns, content structures, typography, and component styles. A student going from Engineering to Computer Science now gets a consistent experience, and maintenance effort dropped significantly.
This project taught us something that goes beyond web design: the most elegant solution is useless if the organization can’t adopt it.
University websites are political environments. Every faculty dean, every department head, every administrative office has opinions about their content. The technical challenge of building a fast, beautiful, accessible site was the straightforward part. The human challenge — aligning dozens of stakeholders with competing priorities — was the real work.
We had to balance design excellence with organizational diplomacy. Clear rationale for every decision. Building consensus through prototypes instead of presentations. Framing the redesign as elevating everyone’s content, not critiquing anyone’s choices.
The numbers back up the approach: 4,200 new students enrolled in the year after the redesign — the largest admissions class in the university’s 12-year digital history. A website that respects its users’ time and intelligence turns out to be a pretty powerful recruitment tool.
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