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JTVC

What we measured, and what replaced it

The old jiet-edu.co.za was a WordPress site that had grown for a decade. It was not ugly and it was not dishonest — it was slow to load in the places its students live, invisible to assistive technology, and carrying content that contradicted itself. This page sets out what was measured, what it cost, and what the replacement does instead.

What the new site does The design system
Learners at a lathe in the engineering workshop

What we measured

Before, and after

Eight things that were measured on both builds. Nothing on this table is an estimate.

<!-- The eyebrow is inline-flex, so it goes on a span inside the cell: applied to the
The old site compared with this rebuild, on eight measures
itself it drops the cell out of table layout and the header row collapses into two lines. --> Measure jiet-edu.co.za This rebuild
Delivery WordPress and Elementor, roughly 40 plugin stylesheets and scripts per page Static HTML, one 14 KB gzipped stylesheet, one 8 KB entry script
Contrast Never audited; body copy set straight onto saturated colour fields WCAG AAA asserted for every text and field pairing, in both themes, at build time
Dark mode None A full second palette, token-driven, with fixed-polarity values so no state inverts
Finding a programme Over 40 pages reachable only through nested menus One filterable, deep-linkable list, seven faculty hubs and site-wide search
Broken content 3 duplicate pairs, 5 empty pages, 5 pages carrying another programme's copy Duplicates dropped, empties replaced, every defect documented for the college to fix at source
Heading structure Jumps from h2 straight to h4 inside programme content Rewritten in document order; no level is skipped on any page
Language English only Interface in English, French, Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish
Verification None Build assertions over every generated page, plus a browser audit at five widths

What the content cost

The defects were in the words, not the design

These were found while extracting the old site page by page. They are published here, and in full in the project's content notes, so the college can fix them at source.

  • Five pages described a different qualification

    The motor and diesel page opened with a description of a management assistant. The boilermaking page described a pipe fitter. The page at /faq/ was not a FAQ at all — it carried the whole NC(V) Marketing curriculum. A prospective student reading any of them was reading about a trade they had not asked about.

  • Five pages published nothing

    /campus/, /national-certificate-vocational/ and three others resolved, appeared in menus, and had no content. They were live links to empty rooms.

  • Two programmes were advertised with nowhere to go

    NC(V) Office Administration and Fitting and Turning were listed on hub pages that had no content page for either. The rebuild names them and offers an enquiry rather than inventing a page the college never wrote.

  • Three pages existed twice

    Duplicate URLs for the public service administrator, the boilermaker and marketing management competed with each other in search results and split whatever authority either had.

The recommendation

Replace the platform. Keep every word.

The content is already ported and checked page for page — every paragraph, list item and table cell over sixty characters in the source is asserted to appear on the rebuilt page. So the decision in front of the college is about the platform, not about the copy.

The case for changing it is not that the old site looked dated. It is that 37 programmes across 7 faculties could only be found by someone who already knew what they were called; that the site had never been checked against a contrast standard; and that five of its pages described the wrong trade to anyone who read them.

What replaces it is a static build with no CMS to keep patched, one stylesheet, and a test suite that fails if a link dies, a heading level is skipped, an image loses its alt text or a colour pairing drops below AAA. The things that went wrong on the old site are now the things the build refuses to ship.

Pages rebuilt
67
Programmes catalogued
37
Faculties
7
Interface languages
5
Contrast standard
WCAG AAA
Runtime dependencies
1

The detail is all published.

Every capability, and every part of the system it is built from.

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