Fakulteta za upravo

Fakulteta za upravo is a faculty of Univerza v Ljubljani, the University of Ljubljana. Its website does not serve one audience but at least five at once: prospective students, enrolled students, researchers, staff and the press. Each comes for something different, and each expects to find it straight away.

Then there is the scale. A faculty site is not a brochure. It is an archive. Degree programmes at three levels, news and events, research centres, a publishing arm, the library, international exchanges, public notices, calls for applications. The old site held all of that content. It simply could not be found.

The task was not to make a prettier site. It was to settle what sits where, and why.

The work started with research and an audit of the existing content, not with design. Only once it was clear what each audience actually came to do did the information architecture take shape: five main branches (For students, Programmes, International, Research and consultancy, About the faculty) plus a separate band for the tools people use every day (e-classrooms, Študis, the library, contact).

The landing page is built as a sorter. Each block answers one question for one audience and ends with one way forward. Programmes are presented by level, because that is how a prospective student decides.

For content that keeps arriving, we prepared templates, not individual pages: a news and events listing with filters and tags, a single article page, overview pages for research and for the faculty itself. That way the faculty can publish for years without the structure coming loose.

The project was run by the agency Madwise, which hired our studio for this work. Our role was research, information architecture and the complete design, prepared for handover to the build, including page templates and component states.

The implementation, search engine optimisation and ongoing maintenance were done by Madwise. That is an honest account of the division of labour, and it is also why we quote no traffic or ranking results here: we did not take those measurements.

The site has been live since 2020. The structure set out then is still in use, after six years of publishing news, events and calls for applications.

That is the only measure we can honestly cite, and for a public institution it says a fair amount: an information architecture that carries six years of daily additions was planned right.