SOAS is a truly remarkable institution — a university committed to understanding and addressing the world’s most pressing challenges through rigorous study of the Global South and East Asia. The privilege of working with them as development lead to rebuild their digital home was something I didn’t take lightly.

The challenge was real: their existing web infrastructure was outdated and fundamentally misaligned with the vibrant marketing and outreach work happening across the university. The gap between their ambitious vision and their website’s ability to deliver it needed closing, and fast.

We built a Drupal CMS platform designed around one core principle: make it dead simple for SOAS to showcase the extraordinary breadth and depth of their course offerings. Rather than another generic university landing page, the site posed thought-provoking questions about global inequalities and refugee crises — questions that resonate with SOAS’s mission. The information architecture was restructured with prospective students in mind, so anyone searching for courses could find exactly what they needed alongside entry requirements, career pathways, and the real-world impact of their degree.

The numbers tell the story: page views jumped 46.7%, online applications shot up 219%, and user numbers grew 70% with new visitors up 86%. International visitors — the lifeblood of SOAS’s global mission — increased by 67%. But the feedback that mattered most came from the staff themselves: “We’ve had many comments saying that the new site looks beautiful…positive feedback from internal teams on how easy it is to use.”

That’s what it’s about. A CMS that doesn’t just publish content, but empowers an institution to tell their story the way they want to tell it, and does the hard work of meeting students where they are.

You can read more here: https://numiko.com/projects/soas-university-of-london/

And you can visit the live site here: https://www.soas.ac.uk/