Case study 03
Timeline: 2020 - 2023
The vision
I worked on this project together with another student over several years as part of our school's homepage elective. The goal was to replace the old school homepage with something that looked more current, loaded faster, and was easier to manage without turning it into a complicated admin system.
Much of the work was less glamorous than the finished screenshots suggest. A big part of it was moving old content out of inconsistent legacy pages, cleaning it up, and finding a structure that still felt familiar to the people who used the site every day. On top of that, we added practical features like scheduling, user management, and typo-tolerant search.
The parts I am still happiest with are the practical ones: the search, the simplified editing workflow, and the attention to performance. Those choices made the site easier to use while still keeping the project realistic for a school environment with non-technical editors.
Strategic goals
Replace an older PHP-heavy setup with something faster, easier to manage, and friendlier to use.
Make the new system understandable for teachers, students, and parents without forcing a dramatic change in behavior.
The challenge
The main challenge was balancing a more modern technical setup with the expectations of users who were used to the old structure.
Resolution
We kept the interface familiar where it mattered, added a strong search experience, and chose simple authoring formats over a complex editorial backend.
Context
Next Experience
Interactive Education: West Germany's Recovery