Event infrastructure for MAPACS ASM 2026

The site opens on Penang. The hero sits over an aerial photograph of the George Town waterfront — a UNESCO World Heritage city — with a translucent nav bar, a "PENANG · 2026" badge, the MAPACS wordmark, and the full title of the 29th Annual Scientific Congress. It sets the tone the theme asks for: science and innovation meeting art, in a place that embodies both.

The two things a prospective delegate needs first are answered before they scroll: glass info cards state the dates — 4 to 6 June 2026 — and the venue, St. Giles Wembley in Penang, with a Register Now call to action sitting in the nav the whole time. The build is the standard mobile-first Next.js stack, so the hero and its cards reflow cleanly from a phone up to a wide desktop.

Past the hero, the event runs as a microsite with a pill-style sub-nav threading its sections together — Overview, Committee, Registration, Abstract Submission, Sponsorship, Programme, Speakers, and Accommodation — so a delegate can move between the welcome letter, the schedule, and the booking details without losing their place. The Overview leads with the Organising Committee's letter framing the "Science & Innovation Meet Art" theme and the UNESCO World Heritage setting.

Behind those tabs sits a genuinely dense congress: ten symposium sessions across breast, body, eyelid, nasal, and facial work, plenary lectures, free scientific paper presentations, and an industry symposium, delivered by a faculty drawn from eight countries — the US, Italy, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, and Cambodia alongside Malaysian surgeons. Registration is tiered by member and non-member, trainee, and international rates with an early-bird cutoff, and the site's job is to make that whole structure navigable rather than overwhelming.

A congress isn't only an agenda — it also has to process funds, for delegate registration and for the event merchandise that goes with a milestone like a 29th congress. Rather than bolt a fragile custom checkout onto the site, I wired the storefront to Shopify, so the merchandise catalogue, cart, and payment handling run on infrastructure built for commerce while the browsing experience stays inside the MAPACS-branded site.

That split is deliberate: the Next.js front end owns the look and the content, and Shopify owns inventory, checkout, and the parts of taking payments that you don't want to reinvent for a one-off event. Registration itself runs through the same storefront — delegate and speaker passes are products alongside add-ons like the Aesthetic Masterclass and the conference dinner — so every payment the congress takes flows through one checkout.