Kırıkkale Üniversitesi Medya is a student-run publication society at the university. News, interviews, event announcements, photo-video — the daily pulse of campus life. Not an official university body; management, editorial, content — all students.
The old site was WordPress, built in 2021, stuck in "we'll fix it soon" mode ever since. Here's the state when they came to us.
The problems
Three problems, really one: the site was designed for one person to run, but the society is many.
- Broken on mobile. Most traffic came from Instagram link-in-bio. 9 of 10 visitors bounced in the first second.
- Publishing bottlenecked on the president. 40-student news team, one-person publishing choke point.
- No backups. A WordPress update once wiped the screen; a week of content lost. Nobody but a few panicked volunteers cared.
Why we took it on
We didn't charge. Part of the Algow team studied at Kırıkkale; we knew what the society did. "Designing the internet for a student society" had lessons for us — especially around content ops.
Two conditions instead of payment:
- Open source. Code on GitHub.
- Student credit. No "designed by Algow" line anywhere.
The society said yes to both. We started in two weeks.
What we dropped, what we kept
Google SEO isn't critical for a society site — traffic comes from Instagram and campus chat. Classic "preserve every URL" rule doesn't apply. We redesigned IA from scratch.
Dropped: per-post comments (spam magnet, nobody to moderate), 14 empty categories (trimmed to 4: News, Events, Interviews, Photo), WordPress ad slots.
Kept: 180+ post archive (CSV import), photo/video archive. Paths changed but intact.
Technical choices
Simple stack, same as Algow itself: PHP 8.3 + MariaDB + Tailwind + Vite.
- Cheap hosting. 40 TL/month shared.
- A student can take it over. Next.js + Supabase + Vercel is unlearnable. PHP + templates — second-year CS student can read it.
- Zero runtime lock-in. The society isn't tied to Algow.
Content management
Three roles:
- President — full admin
- Editor — publish, edit, cover photos
- Writer — drafts only, sends to editor
Sounds heavy for students. Two wins: easier handover when presidents change, new writers get a review pass.
Performance
Lighthouse 92 on 3G. First paint 1.1s. Bounce rate from Instagram dropped 55% → 18%.
Result
Live for a few months. Around 4,000 monthly visitors, 12 active writers, the president no longer publishes every post manually.
Best feedback, from a writer's Instagram story: "published my first article alone, not kidding, it made me happy."
That's the real result. Not traffic — but that someone could do their own work alone. Infrastructure that removes two humans from a chain is infrastructure built right.
Society's Instagram: @kirikkaleuniversitesi.