How I Built the TUM Corporation Website

TUM Corporation needed an online presence to support its activities: strategic consulting, business management, branding, international sourcing and international logistics. Without a site, there was no way for a prospective client or partner to find and evaluate the company before a first contact.

The technical choice: staying simple

No framework, no build step, no package.json, plain HTML/CSS/JavaScript across several pages. For a corporate site that presents services and collects job applications, that's not a lack of ambition, it's the right level of complexity. Every page loads fast, deploys anywhere (the site currently runs on Render as a static site), and carries no dependency to maintain over time.

Two forms handle visitor interactions, one for general contact, one for job applications ("Careers"), both wired to EmailJS, which sends the email straight from the browser without needing a server.

The real challenge: a bug that looked like spelling mistakes

The site was originally built in French. At some point, certain accented characters stopped rendering correctly: the text looked riddled with spelling mistakes, when in fact it was a character-encoding issue. Finding the exact cause took real digging rather than blindly "correcting" the text.

Once the English version was added, the same problem resurfaced in a different form: some text simply wouldn't translate correctly until the underlying encoding was fixed everywhere, not just where the symptom was visible. The lesson: a text-rendering issue that looks like a "typo" is worth investigating as an encoding problem before touching the text itself.

The result

Delivered ahead of the agreed deadline, with the client satisfied from the first look at the finished site: a homepage with the business's key figures (200+ clients, 15+ countries, 300+ projects, active across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas), the six service lines presented clearly, and a direct WhatsApp link for visitors in a hurry.