GSG25 microsite: the anniversary, online
The online home of Global Schools Group's 25th anniversary: six pages that carry the story the book tells, keep the year's achievements and events current, and live on GSG's own domain at globalschools.com/gsg25.
My scope: the site's design and build, its content architecture and copy, the handover to GSG's web team, and the checks before each release. The key visual the pages animate was designed by Motion's creative team, and the story they carry is the one I wrote and edited for the commemorative book.
A site that could keep growing after launch day.
GSG set the structure on 10 September 2026: a film masthead, the story of the first 25 years, the Chairman's letter, a timeline with a growth map, a photo archive and a wall of video messages, with three achievement ledgers, the year's events and the plans for the next 25 years as pages of their own.
It had to be live for the launch on 18 September, sit on GSG's own domain beside the group's main site, and stay current through a year of events without anyone at GSG having to learn a content system. The site was signed off on 16 September and ready for launch day.
Six pages, one content layer.
It's a single-page app built out to static files, with the CSS written by hand and nothing behind it: no backend, no CMS, nothing to keep patched. Home tells the anniversary story in the order GSG asked for. The five inner pages open on the key visual, its arches and children drifting slowly across the top of the page, with a pause button beside them and a still version for anyone who has asked their device for less motion.
Each page borrows its colour from one of the book's five chapters, so someone who has read the book and then opens the site meets the same story in the same order.
Key visual by Motion's creative team; the pages set it in motion.
Where the words live
Nothing on the site is typed into a page. The story sits in a handful of data files, and the parts that keep changing in six plain JSON ledgers: schools, students, alumni, events, the next 25 years and the dignitaries' messages. That mattered for one reason above the rest. Every student or alumnus named on the site needed consent, so each entry carries a flag, and anyone still waiting on a yes stays invisible until it arrives. The editors' working notes ride along in the same files, and a check catches any that would stray onto a page.
Handing it over
GSG's web agency hosts the site next to the group's main one, so it had to work on their server, not on a platform I ran. It went across as a built folder with one rewrite rule, so an address like /gsg25/alumni still lands where it should, and a redirect from the capitalised version that went out first. When their technical team asked for relative file paths, I explained why a single-page site can't have them and kept the deep links working instead. Updating it is three steps: edit the JSON, run the build, upload the folder. No admin panel to learn.
Before it went out
The site respects a visitor's reduced-motion setting and adds a "Reduce motion" switch in the footer that remembers the choice, and the artwork and the film can both be paused. Before each release a script opened all six pages at three screen widths and ran 226 checks, from console errors and sideways scroll to a stray editor's note or a second heading on a page. The final release passed every one of them, which is what I wanted before it sat on a client's own domain.
Live on GSG's domain for launch day.
On 18 September 2026 the site stood alongside the book and the gallery at the launch, and it now runs on globalschools.com/gsg25 as the record of the anniversary year, with events added as the campuses confirm them.
The book and the gallery told the story once. The microsite is where it keeps being told.
