How I Designed a Publication Platform for Aliansi BEM SI

In early 2016, I was appointed as the Media Coordinator for Aliansi BEM SI, the nationwide alliance of student executive boards in Indonesia. There had never been a Media Coordinator before, which meant I wasn’t inheriting an existing media system or established structure. I had to establish one completely from the ground up.

At the time, most of BEM SI publications were distributed through Twitter and Instagram. That worked well enough for fast-moving information, but it was a poor environment for information that needed to be read carefully and found again later. A press release could be posted on social media, but its readability was constrained by the platform. Finding an older release could also become increasingly difficult as newer posts pushed it further away.

For an organization operating at a national scale, I thought we needed something more deliberate and structured. Hence, the website became my first priority from the beginning.

Designing the Publication Layer

I didn’t see the website as a replacement for social media, because each channel had a different role. The website was where people could access detailed information, while social media was better suited to fast-paced communication and could act as the hook that brought people toward the website. This separation also gave us an editorial layer between producing information and publishing it. We could prepare, edit, review, and schedule material before it reached the public. That made the publication process more standardized and gave us better control over quality.

The organizational structure also shaped how I approached the website. BEM SI was a collective of student executive boards rather than a conventional organization with a simple hierarchy. We mainly needed to communicate what the alliance was doing and which university was serving as a coordinator at a given time. There was little reason to turn the website into a complicated organizational system. I also wanted our different media channels to feel connected rather than detached from one another. The website became the deeper layer of that presence, while social media remained the faster channel through which people encountered it.

Designing Under a Deadline

Time was one of the strongest constraints. I already had a team that could manage our existing social media, so I could focus on the website. I also knew that I couldn’t spend weeks going through a conventional design process. I didn’t start with sketches or wireframes. I looked for references instead, studying similar news portals to understand how they organized information and what patterns could work for BEM SI. From there, I moved directly into implementation and refined the design as I built it.

Looking back, the process resembles an agile interpretation of design thinking. At the time, I didn’t have the terminology or a formal methodology for it. It was simply how I had learned to work through years of creating and researching similar websites. My college research also influenced the way I approached the problem. I was simultaneously researching student-oriented websites for a project that was later published as Penggunaan Website Portal Berita sebagai Media Informasi untuk Mahasiswa. Its findings gave me useful insight into student news portals, although I couldn’t simply apply them to BEM SI. The organization had a fundamentally different structure, so the research became a reference for my thinking rather than a specification.

The decision to use WordPress followed the same logic. I didn’t want to spend the limited time available building a publishing system from scratch. WordPress already provided the infrastructure needed for articles, editorial workflows, and scheduling. That allowed me to spend my effort on a tailored theme and the actual experience.

What Happens After the System Is Built?

The website eventually faced a problem that had little to do with its interface. The hosting had been selected without my knowledge or approval, and I was concerned that it hadn’t been properly evaluated for the traffic BEM SI could generate. A few months later, that concern became real. We published a particularly significant release, traffic surged, and the hosting went down. I was notified quickly and coordinated with the hosting provider to mitigate the issue.

The incident reinforced something important about designing websites: the experience depends on the system behind the interface as much as the interface itself. The website wasn’t simply a collection of pages and visual decisions. It depended on infrastructure, publishing processes, and people being able to operate it. A well-designed publication channel is of little use if the infrastructure cannot deliver it when people need it.

That became even more apparent after my time as Media Coordinator ended. Years later, I noticed that the website wasn’t maintained consistently. This didn’t surprise me because I had already considered that possibility when I first designed it. The Media Coordinator role was new, and future board members could have very different priorities. There was no guarantee that whoever inherited the position would approach the website with the same attention.

This was also why I had deliberately limited how much I invested in the system beyond what this organization actually needed. I could have developed a broader visual identity or built a more elaborate system, especially since BEM SI had very little visual identity beyond its logo. But I didn’t see enough organizational value in making that investment at the time. The potential benefit to my own portfolio was clearer than the benefit to BEM SI, and that wasn’t sufficient reason for me to do it personally.

The website’s later history reinforced that judgment. Maintaining and improving a website requires someone who is willing and able to take responsibility for it over time. A system can make that work easier, but it cannot guarantee that the next person will care about maintaining or improving it consistently. That is a limitation of designing for an organization whose people and priorities will inevitably change.

That doesn’t make the original decision wrong. In 2016, BEM SI needed a better way to publish information. Social media provided speed and reach, while the website provided depth, readability, searchability, and sufficient editorial control. WordPress allowed me to solve that problem quickly, while a tailored design let me shape the experience around the organization’s actual needs.

That was the problem I was solving, and within that context, the website was the right decision. What happened to it later belonged to a different problem. Organizations change, people move on, and priorities are replaced. Designing for that reality is possible, but it also requires deciding how much of that future is actually worth designing for.