CACC Montessori School

A redesign that became a platform

CACC Montessori is a small private school in Hockessin, Delaware. Its old website had become difficult to navigate, difficult to update, and almost invisible in search. That was more than a cosmetic problem: families looking for a local Montessori program were not finding the school, and prospective staff were missing it too.

I initially came in to redesign the site. As I learned how the school worked, the brief changed. A nicer homepage would help, but it would slowly become outdated again unless the staff could maintain it themselves. I ended up building both a new public website and a small, purpose-built admin console behind it.

The result

Organic traffic grew to nearly six times its previous level. The school also began receiving new enrollment and job inquiries through the site. I do not think that came from any single clever feature; it came from fixing the fundamentals and making every page useful to both a visitor and a search engine.

Designing for trust

A school website has a different job from a typical product landing page. Parents are not looking for a dramatic sales pitch. They are trying to understand the environment their child will enter, the people who will teach them, and what happens next if the school feels right.

I kept the visual language calm and approachable, used real classroom photography, and rewrote the information architecture around those questions. Montessori terminology stayed where it was meaningful, but the core philosophy and admissions process were explained in plain language.

The admissions section became a clear sequence rather than a loose collection of documents. That reduced the repeated “How do I enroll?” questions and made the path from first visit to contacting the school much easier to follow.

Making the school self-sufficient

The admin console became the most important part of the project. CACC does not have a technical team, but its website changes constantly: staff turn over, forms are replaced, programs evolve, and announcements expire. Requiring a developer for each edit would have recreated the original problem.

Instead of installing a broad CMS, I built only the workflows the school needed. The interface is intentionally unremarkable: familiar forms, clear labels, and no page builder or plugin system to learn.

The technical shape

The public site uses the Next.js App Router and renders indexable pages with individual titles, descriptions, and social metadata. Dynamic routes support staff profiles and posts without sacrificing a clear URL structure. Supabase handles structured content, authentication, and uploaded files, while middleware protects the admin routes.

This split kept both sides focused. Visitors get fast pages with no administrative complexity, while staff get a private workspace built around their actual tasks. The shared content layer means an approved update appears on the public site without a code change or deployment.

What I took away

CACC was a useful reminder that technical ambition and technical complexity are not the same thing. Nothing here needed to be novel. The work mattered because the system fit a real institution: families could find and understand the school, and the people running it could keep that information accurate.

The nearly sixfold traffic increase was the most visible number, but ownership was the longer-term outcome. The website stopped being a neglected artifact and became something the school could use every day.