A school website built around
one admissions season.

The obvious design is two forms, two tables, two notification emails and two exports — because they are two different things. The obvious design is wrong here, and the reason has nothing to do with software. The front office does not think of them as different things. Both are a parent who is interested, both get the same phone call within a day, and both need to be visible to whoever picks up when that parent rings back.

One table with a type flag means one place to look, one export for the principal, and no scenario where an enquiry sits unanswered in the inbox nobody opened this week. When we later needed to count enquiries by month for the admissions review, the query was one line rather than a reconciliation.

Four hundred photographs is the point at which a school website either works on a phone or does not exist. Uploaded straight from a camera, that gallery is tens of megabytes per page — which on a mid-range Android over a patchy mobile connection is not a slow page, it is a closed tab.

Generating responsive AVIF and WebP versions at build time moves that cost to us, once, instead of to every parent, every visit. The gallery loads at a fraction of the original weight and the photographs still look like the school.

We are stating this plainly because it is where a real budget decision gets made. Given a fixed number of days, an image pipeline is less impressive in a demo than a scroll animation, and it is worth considerably more to a school in March. We would spend the days the same way again.

Staff can change fee tables, dates, circulars and page copy without calling us — those change on the school's timetable, not ours, and waiting on a developer to publish a revised fee schedule is an absurd way to run a school.

What they deliberately cannot do is move sections, reorder navigation or delete the admissions path. Full page-builder freedom sounds generous and reliably ends the same way: a term later, the enquiry button is below three new sections somebody added in good faith, and nobody connects the drop in enquiries to the change.

Editable content, fixed structure is the line we now draw by default on every site where a form is the point. It is the same principle behind our school fee management system: the school controls the data, we hold the workflow steady.