Case study / 01
2026 · Whitesands School
A complete digital reset for a 25-year-old Lagos Catholic school.
Twenty-five years of standing, and a website that showed none of it. We rebuilt Whitesands from the ground up around its “Duc in Altum” identity: fast on the mid-range phones parents actually carry, editorial enough to read as established, and ordered so a parent finds what they came for in about ten seconds.
- Role
- Design + Development
- Timeline
- 6 weeks
- Stack
- Next.js, Tailwind, Vercel
01 / Problem
A school site that worked against the school.
Whitesands had outgrown its previous site. Pages were slow, admissions funnelled parents through a confusing PDF, and the homepage hadn't been touched in years. Staff couldn't make updates without external help, so it stayed frozen, and started reading as out-of-date to the families it needed to reach.
02 / Approach
Strip it back, then rebuild around how the school actually works.
We started with a content audit. What does a parent, a prospective family, and a staff member each need to find inside of ten seconds? That answer shaped the structure (admissions, life on campus, calendar, contact) before a single screen was designed. From there, an editorial layout system using Fraunces for headings and a confident, restrained palette. Hand-built in Next.js on Vercel for speed, with a small CMS surface so the front office can publish announcements and term-letters without touching code.
03 / Outcome
Faster, fuller, and the school can drive it.
Page-load time dropped substantially across the site, admissions inquiries became a single guided form, and the site now ranks for queries it never reached before. The part that matters most: staff push updates themselves, weekly, without any handoff.
- Page speed
- +220%
- Lighthouse
- 96
- Pages
- 4 → 12
Page speed
Lighthouse
Pages
“Everyone I've sent the link to for appraisal has rated the work very high.”
Andrew Eze · Whitesands School
“The CTAs are quite compelling. This upgrade is long overdue.”
Forwarded review · via Whitesands School
“This is beautiful. For a school like Whitesands, the upgrade is long overdue.”
Forwarded review · via Whitesands School
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