School website builder.

Most school websites are built once by a contractor, handed over with a login nobody remembers, and frozen the day the contract ends. The term dates are wrong by October; the application form is a PDF download; and the only way to fix a typo is to email the agency and wait.

YESS rebuilds the school site as something the front office owns. It is a section-based builder — choose a theme, add pages, fill them with pre-made sections, edit the words, and publish — with no code and no developer. And because the site is part of the platform rather than bolted on, its forms do real work: a prospective parent who applies on the site lands in the admissions pipeline, and a teacher who applies to a vacancy lands in the recruitment dashboard.

The school's face to the world — edited by the school, wired to the school.

The builder lives at /dashboard/website — a single page with three tabs: Pages, Theme, and Settings. Across the header sits the control that matters most: a Site Published master toggle, a strip showing the live URL, a Preview button, and a Live / Offline badge. Until the master toggle is on, the public site stays dark no matter what is built beneath it.

The work splits cleanly across the three tabs. Pages is where you build the structure and the content. Theme is where you set the look. Settings is where you handle the address, the search-engine metadata, and the domain. The chapters below take them in that order.

The Pages tab lists every page on the site — Home, About, Admissions, Contact — each with a publish toggle of its own. The first page becomes the home page at the root slug; the rest slugify from their titles. Opening a page splits the screen: the section list on the left, a live preview on the right.

A page is made of sections, and the catalogue offers nineteen types grouped by purpose — layout sections (hero, about, stats, features, programs, cta), media (gallery, video), social proof (testimonials, awards, staff, news, events), and conversion (admissions-steps, apply form, careers, faq, contact), plus a raw HTML section for anything bespoke. Most types offer several layout variants — a hero can be centred, split, cinematic, minimal, or an announcement bar — so the same content can wear a different shape.

Building a page is direct manipulation: Add section from the catalogue, reorder by dragging or with the up/down arrows, toggle a section's visibility, duplicate it, edit its content in a dialog, or delete it. For a fast start, the template picker offers ten complete starter sites — classic school, modern academy, faith-based, STEM focus, bilingual, admissions-focused and more — each of which populates a page with a full, designed set of sections in one click.

The Theme tab sets the site's whole visual character from a few choices. Pick one of eight themes — modern, classic, bold, warm, editorial, tech, organic, geometric — each pairing a heading and body typeface and a set of spacing, radius and shadow rules. Then set the colours: choose from twelve palette presets or dial in a custom primary and accent, pick a background surface from six options, and choose a text style (high-contrast, soft, or muted). The colour pickers autosave as you nudge them, and a live swatch shows the result.

The site's logo and brand colours default from the school's central branding, so the website matches the portal, the report cards and the ID cards without re-entering anything. The Settings tab links straight to /dashboard/settings when you want to change the brand at its source rather than just on the site.

This is the chapter that separates a YESS site from a templated brochure. Two of the section types are not decoration — they are live front doors into the platform.

The apply form section lets a prospective family apply online. The programmes and academic years fill in from the school's own published data; on submit, the application is written into the admissions pipeline as a self-submitted application, admissions staff are notified, and the applicant is handed a reference and a token to track their status at /sites/[school]/application/[token]. The same form is always reachable at /sites/[school]/apply even before it is placed on a page.

The careers section lists the vacancies the school has flagged for the public website — only those that are published and within their deadline — and lets an external candidate apply inline with a cover letter, landing the application in the recruitment dashboard with a job reference. Its standalone home is /sites/[school]/careers. Both forms are fully translated across English, French and Arabic.

The Settings tab handles how the world finds the site. You set the SEO meta title and description that show in a search result and a shared link, and you point a custom domain at the site. Two layers of publishing gate what goes live: each page has its own publish toggle, and the site has the master Site Published switch — a page appears publicly only when both are on.

On addresses, the platform serves each site from a subdomain of the YESS host — your-school.yourhost — routed automatically once the platform host and wildcard DNS are configured, with reserved names like www and app held back. A custom domain is stored on the school and recognised by the public site lookup; the last mile — pointing your own domain's DNS at the platform and mapping it at the edge — is an infrastructure step, and the Settings tab tells you the CNAME to set.

The public site is served at /sites/[school]/[[...path]], resolved by the school's subdomain or custom domain. The platform reads the school's theme and palette into a set of CSS variables and the right web fonts, then renders each section by its type and layout variant into a styled page. The site wears a sticky navigation with the school's logo and a Portal Login button that drops a parent into the branded login for their school, and a footer.

Publishing is enforced at this boundary, not just in the UI. In production the public route shows a page only when the site is published, the page is published, and the section is visible; anything draft or hidden is withheld. (In a development preview, drafts render so the builder's own preview is faithful.)

The builder, the themes, the live application, careers and contact forms, and subdomain plus custom-domain serving all ship today. The items below are scaffolded or partial, and are flagged honestly so you can plan around them.

The website is the public edge of several modules — it shows the school off and funnels strangers into the platform.