Student Fairs & Webinars Hub.
A landing page for students planning to study abroad. It works out a student's country and leads with the fairs and webinars they can join: university fairs in person or online, and webinars shown in their own time zone. The fairs are BMI Global Ed's international student recruitment fairs, where universities meet students face to face or online.
Students choosing where to study abroad
BMI Global Ed runs recruitment fairs where universities meet students who want to study in another country: 60–80 fairs a year across 18 countries. A fair is only useful if you can get to it, so a visitor's first question is what's on near them. Online fairs and webinars answer the same need for anyone who can't travel.
In-person fairs
Universities exhibit at a venue in the student's own country, and students meet them face to face.
Online fairs
The same meeting between students and universities, run online for anyone who can't get to a venue.
Webinars
Live online talks that students register for, put questions to the speaker, or watch later as a recording.
It opens on your country
Before the visitor touches anything, the page looks up their country from their IP address and leads with that country's in-person and online fairs, alongside the webinars they can join, with every time converted to their own time zone. Nothing is hidden: the detected country is a starting point, and they can switch it or browse every fair.
Starts where the visitor is
A geo-IP lookup pre-selects the visitor's country on load, so the first thing they see is what's on where they are.
Every fair, one step away
The detected country never traps anyone: a visitor can switch country or see every fair in the listing.
Times in your time zone
Webinar times are converted to the visitor's own time zone, so nobody has to work out when a talk hosted elsewhere starts for them.
Register, or ask the speaker
Each webinar has its own registration form, with that webinar's own questions, and a form to contact the speaker, both protected by Google reCAPTCHA.
Past webinars stay useful
A finished webinar stays on the site as a recording, so a student who missed it can still watch.
Found through search
Server-side SEO and schema.org event markup keep webinar pages indexable and shareable, so students can find them from a search.
It stays up when the content system doesn't
This is the public page students land on, so it can't go down because the system behind it has. The fairs and webinars are edited in a separate WordPress content system (a CMS). A layer in between, a backend-for-frontend, serves visitors from a Redis copy of what the CMS last said. Five times a day it asks the CMS for a fresh copy, and it only replaces the old one when that fetch succeeds. If the CMS is slow or down, the page keeps serving the last good copy, which is kept for 12 hours, and the team gets a Slack alert.
Every webinar visitor also sees the fairs
BMI runs paid ads that bring students to its webinar pages. Because the hub shows every way to meet a university on one page, those visitors also see the in-person and online fairs open to them, so the traffic bought for the webinars works for the fairs too.
More from the same visit
A student who comes for one webinar also sees the fairs in their country and the online fairs they can join, without having to go looking.
One ad budget, both events
The ads were bought for the webinars. The page they land on also shows the fairs, so the same spend puts the fairs in front of the same students.
On the Times Higher Education brand
Moved onto the group's better-known brand after the acquisition, and still live at fairs.timeshighereducation.com.
What I directed
I directly managed the offshore engineering team that built and runs this hub day to day (standups, catch-ups, task assignment), giving direction verbally and through written specifications and wireframes rather than through code.
- Directed the offshore engineering team building BMI's centralised hub for prospective students (a decoupled React/Express BFF serving fair-listing and webinar-registration marketing pages) through daily standups, task assignment, and written specifications and wireframes.
- Was involved in both the decision and the technical execution of the platform's rebrand from Talk Global Study to Times Higher Education, the group's more widely recognised brand.
- The hub's cache-aside Redis layer, with a 12-hour stale fallback that keeps fair listings and webinar registration serving through upstream CMS slowness, was built by the offshore team I directed.
- The same team built the cron-driven cache pre-warming, which runs five times a day with bounded retries and a Slack alert on failure.
- The team deploys it through AWS CodeBuild and CodeDeploy to EC2 under pm2, with a manual rollback path through timestamped deployments.
Tech stack
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