A school website from kickoff to production in 10 working days

Most of the work in this portfolio runs to months. This one ran ten working days. In mid-2024, while I was Head of ICT at Lycus Technologies, Bright Hope Schools, a private school in Tanzania, needed a professional web presence on the budget and timeline of a school, not an enterprise. I delivered the complete site in a single two-week sprint, and it has stayed live at brighthope.sc.tz since.

The challenge

Bright Hope Schools had no website. Everything a prospective parent might want to know required a phone call or a physical visit: the curriculum, the programmes, the admissions process, what the facilities look like. That works for families in the neighbourhood; it fails for working parents who shortlist schools in the evening from a phone. In Tanzania’s competitive private education market, a school that can’t be evaluated online is at a quiet but constant disadvantage against schools that can, and the reach of word-of-mouth only extends so far.

The second half of the challenge was the shape of the engagement itself. A school website is a small project, and small projects die when they are treated like big ones: long discovery phases, growing feature wish-lists, infrastructure nobody asked for. The site had to justify its cost by being live quickly, not by being ambitious. The brief I set with the school was blunt: a credible, professional presence, in production inside two weeks.

The approach

I ran the engagement as one focused sprint, and the most important work happened at the start: deciding what not to build. Rapid scoping with the school settled the launch set at four things: general school information, the admissions process, programme details, and a way for parents to get in touch. Everything non-essential to those four was cut from the launch scope. That single decision is what made the deadline realistic; every day spent debating extras is a day not spent shipping the essentials.

I built the site with React and Tailwind CSS, which are the right size of tool for this job. Tailwind keeps styling iteration fast when one person is designing and building at the same time, and React’s component model let the programme and admissions pages share structure instead of duplicating it. The design is content-first: the school’s programmes and values carry each page, rather than decoration carrying thin content. And because most parents would arrive on a phone, I treated the mobile experience as the primary one, with the desktop layout building on top of it rather than the other way around.

The outcome

The complete website was designed, built, and deployed in ten working days, kickoff to production inside the two-week sprint. The result is fast, responsive across mobile and desktop, and gives prospective parents what they previously could only get by visiting in person: a clear picture of the school, its programmes, and how to start the admissions process.

It has also lasted. As of August 2026, more than two years after delivery, the site is still live and serving at brighthope.sc.tz. For a small fixed-scope build, that is the outcome that matters most. Nothing about it has needed rescuing.

There are only two headline figures on this page, and that is deliberate. A two-week website does not produce transformation metrics, and I won’t invent any. What this project demonstrates is narrower and still worth showing: scoping discipline, and the ability to take something from nothing to production quickly when that is what the situation calls for. The instinct is the same one behind the larger projects in this portfolio (ship the essential thing first, defer the rest), applied at the smallest scale where it still counts.