On June 18, the new institutional landing page of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech (UPC) was launched. This is a strategic project to attract talented and motivated students for bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral, and lifelong learning degrees, while positioning the UPC as a leading public university in engineering, architecture, science, and technology.
The new UPC home page features a much more modern and attractive design, alongside a content structure tailored to the areas of interest of prospective students, as well as the various groups, entities, and users seeking information about the university. Ensuring accessibility so that everyone can always easily find what they are looking for has been another key goal of this renewal.
The ThinkUPC and UPCnet team, working in close collaboration with the UPC Communications Service and the UPC IT Area, played a fundamental role in launching the new home page. Together, they took on the challenge of designing an ad-hoc systems and security architecture for a highly visible website with a heavy volume of traffic. As this is the organization’s first project developed using this cutting-edge technological combination, it required the ultimate commitment from the entire technical team.
A profound technological infrastructure renewal
The new main page has been implemented using Plone 6 with a next-generation Volto frontend. To guarantee optimal performance and maximum resilience against traffic peaks, the entire system has been deployed using Docker containers and has successfully passed demanding security audits and stress tests.
At the infrastructure level, the project successfully resolved the challenge of managing two parallel environments (the new one for the home page and the current one for the remaining pages, with each environment relying on multiple servers) without penalizing search engine indexing or ranking.
Clean design and an absolute commitment to accessibility
Although the general structure of the navigation menus remains consistent to facilitate the transition for users, the new interface—based on the original design created by the company eMascaró—is remarkably clearer, more dynamic, and more intuitive. The goal was to generate a genuine “WOW effect” that effectively communicates the UPC’s positioning as a reference technological university.
To guarantee universal accessibility, an intensive effort was made to achieve the WCAG 2.2 AA standard in compliance with Royal Decree 1112/2018 of September 7 on the accessibility of public sector websites and mobile applications. Key improvements include:
- Rigorous and structured semantic content tagging.
- Guaranteed full keyboard navigation and screen reader compatibility.
- Zoom support up to 200% without content loss.
- Automatic darkening filters on images and videos with overlaid text to ensure optimal optical contrast.
In addition, the mobile device experience has been fully optimized to ensure minimal loading times. Automatic language management (Catalan, Spanish, and English) has been integrated based on browser preferences, eliminating annoying redirects. Furthermore, accessibility requirements have been implemented in both design and programming for dark mode navigation, an option now available in the main menu.
Achieving this technological success was possible thanks to the involvement and dedication of everyone who took part in this project. With this milestone, we reaffirm our expertise in the digital transformation of complex, high-concurrency corporate web environments.
