Student Travel Center
A study & work-abroad programs site for Colombian students, redesigned and rebuilt end to end as sole technical lead.
Problem
The project arrived a year behind schedule and over budget, with every delivery reopening decisions that had already been approved — the real blocker wasn't the site, it was the review process itself.
Solution
Reset the process before writing any code: locked branding first, then low-fidelity wireframes to agree on direction, then a fully clickable high-fidelity Figma prototype with every design decision justified — pushing revisions to the cheapest possible stage before any of it became production code.
1-year delay → shipped
Timeline
Tech stack
Homepage: sell the destination, not the paperwork
Study/work-abroad is a paperwork-heavy product (visas, program fees, partner universities), but the homepage leads with a full-bleed destination shot and a search bar — “Explore the beauty of the world” — instead of a program list. The bureaucracy shows up later, once the visitor is already sold on going somewhere.
Below the fold, programs are organized as a grid of destination cards (Colombia, Dublin, Malta, Dubai, Sarajevo, Milan, Madrid, Japan) rather than a dropdown filter — browsable and shareable, since a student comparing options with friends can screenshot a card instead of describing a filtered search result.
One template, every country
Every country/program combination (Dubai Work & Study, Malta Work & Study, and so on) renders from the same templated page: hero, benefits, included services, FAQ. That’s what made a one-year backlog of “add this new destination” requests tractable — a new country is new content in the same structure, not a new page built from scratch.
A blog for the undecided
Not everyone landing on the site is ready to book — most are still deciding whether to go at all, or stuck on practical questions a program page doesn’t answer: what to pack, what a work-and-study visa actually involves, what a camp counselor role in the US is like day to day. I built a blog to catch exactly that audience, with posts answering those specific pre-decision questions (packing checklists, program breakdowns, day-in-the-life pieces) instead of generic travel content — content marketing doing the job of a sales conversation for visitors who aren’t ready to talk to one yet.
The process fix
The actual blocker on this project was never technical — every delivery reopened decisions the client had already signed off on, because each round trip surfaced a new “what if” that hadn’t been considered. The fix: lock branding first, then low-fidelity wireframes to agree on structure before any visual design, then a fully clickable high-fidelity Figma prototype with every decision justified in writing next to it — so approval meant approving something concrete, not a verbal description of intent.
The habit that made it stick: preparing a second version of the most likely change request in advance of each review, so meetings ended with a decision made on the spot instead of “let me mock that up and send it over” — which is exactly the kind of round trip that had cost the project a year before I joined.
Details
The live site has evolved since launch — the Figma file linked above is the accurate reference for the design as originally built.
