Websites is where your school’s public site lives: the pages a parent reads before enrolling, the programme you advertise, the photographs of the buildings, the contact form that reaches your office. It is a separate thing from the administration portal — nobody needs an account to see it, and everything on it is content you chose to publish.

The head of school normally owns it, with the secretary writing the news and the proprietor approving what goes out. The screen is a list of sites first: each row is one website with its name, its own address, its theme, its publication status and whether it is the primary site. Opening a row takes you into the site itself, where the content and the visitor figures are.

Two settings decide how much work this is. Status controls whether visitors can see anything at all — draft means nobody, published means everybody, unpublished means the site is switched off without losing what you wrote. And Primary marks the site that answers when your school is reached without naming one.

Every site answers on its own address

Each row carries a Key and a Custom Domain. Until you connect a domain of your own, the site answers on the address Ekati gives it from that key. To use your school’s real domain, type it into Custom Domain and the screen shows the exact DNS records to create at your domain host — one copy, one paste, and the site answers on your address.

Change the domain after launch and nothing is lost. Your pages, menus, programmes and photographs belong to the site, not to the address, so a corrected domain is a five-minute job rather than a rebuild.

Theme is one click, not a migration

The Theme column is editable in place. Choose a theme from the list, then open Themes to activate it and adjust its own settings. Themes change the presentation only — your wording, including the terminology you have customised, is stored on the site itself, so switching themes cannot lose it.

Draft, published, unpublished

Draft means you are still building: visitors see nothing. Published is the live site. Unpublished takes a working site off the internet without deleting a single page — the right state for a school closed for the holidays, or one waiting on its official approval.

Start with sample content, then clear it

A brand-new site is an empty shell, which is discouraging to look at. The row’s populate action loads a complete example site — pages, sections, menus, programmes, posts, events — so you can see how a finished site hangs together. The matching purge action removes that example content again in one step. Treat it as a model to copy from, not as content to publish.

A page is a stack of sections you can reorder

You do not type a whole page as one block of text. You add sections — a hero image with a message, a paragraph of text, a gallery, a form, a list of programmes — and then drag them into the order you want. Reordering is instant, and duplicating a section copies its layout, which is how a ten-programme page gets built in ten minutes.

Exactly one page is the home page. It is the only one a visitor is guaranteed to reach, so it should carry your school’s name, what it teaches and how to get in touch — and nothing that requires scrolling to be understood.

Menus are built separately, on purpose

A menu item points at a page, a programme, a post, or any address you type. Keeping navigation apart from pages means you can rename a page, move a programme between sections, or put a link to your admissions form in the menu without rewriting the menu. Arrange items as top level, dropdown or footer, and the same menu can appear in the header and at the foot of every page.

Draft pages do not appear publicly

A page left in draft is visible to staff only. The site’s own dashboard counts how many pages are still drafts, so you can see at a glance whether last week’s news about the new term was actually published or quietly forgotten.

Files and forms a visitor can use

The Resources area publishes what you will be asked for repeatedly: a prospectus, the registration form as a PDF, the school rules, a link to the examination platform. The contact form sits in the inbox and writes straight to your school from a public page — the shortest route to an enquiry.

Thirteen words you can rename

On the website settings screen you can rename the words the site uses: what it calls its offerings (Programs, Classes, Subjects or Training programs), who its people are (Staff, Teachers, Instructors or Faculty), what the school itself is called, and the labels for Students, Apply now, News, Events, Gallery, Facilities, Departments, Admissions, Resources and Contact.

The default already suits your school

You do not have to guess. Ekati starts from your programme mode and picks wording that already reads naturally: a basic-education school is offered Classes and Teachers, a secondary school Subjects and Staff, a vocational centre Training programs and Instructors, a university Programs and Faculty. Override only the words your school actually wants differently.

Change it once, not page by page

Because terminology belongs to the site rather than to a page or a theme, renaming a word updates every heading, every button and every menu label that uses it. You change it once in the settings, and the change holds even if you later switch themes.

What Google reads at the top of every page

Each site has its own set of search-engine settings: the page title Google shows as the blue line, the description underneath it, keywords, the image used when the page is shared on a messaging app, and the small favicon in the browser tab. Write the title as a phrase a parent would type — “Lycée Saint-Michel Douala — inscriptions 2026” beats “Welcome”.

Paste the identifiers you already hold

The same screen carries the identifiers for Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and the Meta Pixel. Ekati does not create these accounts for you; paste the identifiers you already have, and traffic on your public site is counted on the dashboard inside your site’s own page.

Four figures worth reading

Opening your site shows four cards over a period you choose: views, visitors, pages per visitor and bounce. Below them sit the top pages, the pages visitors arrive on, where they came from, and which browsers and systems they used. A healthy school site has many visitors arriving on the home page or the admissions page and browsing two or three pages before leaving.

A short readiness list

The site’s dashboard also tells you whether it is ready to be found and to look like itself: a search-engine title and description, a theme that has been configured, and a home page. Each line is a five-minute job, and together they are the difference between a site families find and a site they do not.