How we shipped a social platform on WordPress with full WCAG compliance

Client

Uniwersytet WSB Merito w Gdańsku - a private university in Gdańsk running a Ministry-funded project to bridge the gap between academic institutions and the business community across the Pomeranian region.

Challenge

Most platforms get built because someone had an idea. This one got built because a university spent a year proving the idea was necessary.

WSB Merito didn't arrive with a vague brief. They arrived with a research report - surveys across 504 respondents from academia and business, qualitative case studies across three Pomeranian universities, design thinking workshops with 30 participants, and focus group interviews. The data was unambiguous: science and business in the region operated in parallel worlds, with no shared infrastructure for collaboration. Projects moved through dean's offices, private groups, and word of mouth. Opportunities disappeared in the friction.

The university's answer was a dedicated communication platform.

What we built

Before a single line of code was written, Pirxey ran UX and UI workshops with the WSB Merito team. The goal wasn't to gather requirements - it was to decompose them.

A year of research had produced a clear problem statement, but translating that into functional architecture required working through the details together: what types of content the platform needed to carry, how different user groups would interact with it, where personalization mattered, and where simplicity did.

Those workshops paid off in the build. The platform handles three content types - collaboration offers, events, and general announcements - each with its own lifecycle. Users can filter by status, date, location, author, and tags. They can follow content, set calendar reminders, and receive email notifications when followed items change. Institutional and individual profiles connect to each other: a researcher can link to their university, a company can find a team, a student can see what's available before it disappears into a group chat.

The feed isn't algorithmic in a heavy sense - but it is personalized. Users configure areas of interest, and the platform surfaces content that matches. Tags connect people to relevant offers without anyone having to search manually.

Direct messaging, group conversations, and social media cross-posting round out the communication layer. The platform runs in Polish and English.

The technology choice - WordPress - was set before Pirxey joined the project. What wasn't set was how to make WordPress behave like something it typically isn't: a social platform with personalized feeds, real-time-adjacent messaging, complex user hierarchies, and institutional-grade accessibility requirements. Pirxey built on a proprietary starter theme, writing the platform as custom code throughout - every feature built to specification, nothing off the shelf except where it made sense.

The platform was financed through public funds, which meant WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance wasn't optional - it was a contractual obligation with a ministerial audit at the end.

WCAG at this level is not a checklist item. It touches contrast ratios, focus states, hover behaviours, keyboard navigation, and screen reader compatibility - and it requires that design and development are aligned from the start. The delivery documentation that Pirxey produced gave the client something concrete to show auditors: formal confirmation that each requirement had been addressed, who addressed it, and how. When the audit came, the documentation was ready.

Outcome

A bilingual (PL/EN) social platform, live at wnib.pl, built to handle a minimum of 10,000 registered users and 50,000 database records.

Full WCAG 2.1 compliance, documented. UX/UI delivered by an external design team working to accessibility standards from the first wireframe. Content management training for the client's team. One year of support and maintenance.

The platform delivers what the research confirmed was missing: a single place where academia and business in Pomerania can find each other, without going through a dean's office first.