Case study · Play school · Lucknow
A play school website built for a parent standing in a queue
Awadhi International Kids School has taught children aged one and a half to six in Basantkunj, Malhour since 2021. It had photographs, a good reputation on the street, and no website. Parents who heard the name had nowhere to look it up.
The numbers
Every figure here was measured on the live site, from Lucknow, on the day it went out.
downloaded to draw the page
The whole homepage, compressed, as a phone receives it.
to deliver that page
Measured from Lucknow, three runs, cold.
smaller than the first build
It began as a single 5.66 MB file with everything inlined.
photos and videos
De-duplicated by image content, then chosen one by one.
The problem worth solving
A school website is read almost entirely on a phone, often on mobile data, usually by a parent with about thirty seconds of patience. The first version of this site was a single file with every photograph baked into it — 5.66 MB before anything appeared on screen. On a good connection you noticed. On a normal one you left.
So the work was not decoration. It was making a photo-heavy site behave like a light one: photographs loaded only as you reach them, video that waits until it is actually on screen, and a first view small enough to arrive before the parent gives up.
What the site does
- A gallery of 58 photographs and two videos of the children’s own Independence Day and Janmashtami celebrations, opening full-screen with swipe and keyboard navigation.
- Video that behaves itself: the one on the front page plays silently on arrival, and the two in the gallery download nothing at all until a visitor actually scrolls to them.
- An enquiry form that opens WhatsApp with the message already written, because that is how parents in Lucknow actually get in touch.
- Programmes, daily routine, facilities, fees enquiry, the leadership team, and parent reviews — on one page a parent can read on a phone in a queue.
What it runs on
- Its own domain, aikidsschool.in, with every other address — www, http, and the old demo link — sent to it permanently, so the school’s search ranking accumulates in one place instead of three.
- A certificate that renews itself, and images and video cached for a month, so a returning parent pays for almost nothing twice.
- No page builder, no monthly platform fee, no plugin that breaks in a year. Plain HTML, CSS and images on a server the school’s owner can move whenever he likes.
Want one like it?
Schools, clinics, nurseries, shops — owner-run businesses in Lucknow. You talk to the person who writes the code.