The situation
- Nobody could update the site. It hadn't changed since June 2025, because the editor on the platform it ran on no longer worked.
- The platform wasn't the school's. Its content couldn't be downloaded in full, so if the platform closed, everything went with it.
- Content was already lost: the director's message, the school hymn, the virtual tour and about 400 photos from 2024.
- The gallery had over 2,000 photos on a single page. Only the first 20 or so loaded, the rest never appeared, and the page never finished loading.
- The domain sat in a Cloudflare account nobody could recover.
- Email authentication had never worked. DKIM signing was on, but the DNS record had never been published, so every email failed the check.
What we did
A fixed price, agreed in writing: offer on 2 September, site live on 26 September 2026.
Complete archive
A frozen copy of the entire site, made before any change and handed over to the school.
Hosting in the school's name
On the school's account and card, not ours.
Domain moved without Cloudflare access
The site went live with a free, auto-renewing certificate, and school email ran without interruption throughout.
Email fixed
The DKIM record that had been missing since signing was turned on is now published on the domain.
Photos organised
Over 2,000 photos went from one page into 353 albums by year, in fast-loading formats.
Zero broken links
The check replays every link from the old site and confirms each target still exists on the new one.
Simple publishing
Staff publish albums, announcements and documents themselves, and contact-form messages arrive in an admin inbox.
Privacy
A privacy policy written from what the site actually does, with reference to Law 195/2024. The site sends visitors to no third party when a page loads (measured), so no cookie banner is needed.
Found in passing and fixed
Problems on the old site that nobody had reported:
- one album published under the wrong event's title;
- 14 photos with no album;
- four albums showing one photo two or three times instead of the right ones;
- the contact form and the RO/EN switch, both promised in the offer, had stopped working on the new server. We found them by checking the build line by line against the signed offer, before the school ever saw them broken.
Result
Before, the site was frozen, the content was held by someone else's platform, and email was quietly failing authentication. Now the school owns every piece, publishes on its own, and nothing from the past was lost in the move.
The handover included staff training, a written guide, the complete archive on the school's own storage and a maintenance proposal.