A launch checklist for a microschool website that turns inquiries into visits and applications

Your numbers are small, and that changes the advice

Before you write a page: five things you must be able to say plainly

If you cannot finish these five sentences without hedging, the website is not the problem yet. Write them first — they become the homepage, and every other page is an expansion of one of them.

1. Who this school is for, and who it is not for. Ages and grades, and the kind of child who does well here. The second half is the one schools skip, and it is the half that makes the first half believable. A school that is right for everybody is describing nothing.
2. What a day looks like, hour by hour. Not the philosophy — the day. What time it starts, what happens first, how long the blocks are, when they go outside, how lunch works, what time it ends. A parent is trying to picture their own child inside your Tuesday.
3. How big the groups are, and who teaches them. Numbers, and names with faces. Group size is the reason most families are on your site instead of a district one; do not make them ask.
4. What it costs, and what happens if a family cannot pay it. One number, or a range and the aid path. See below — this is the single most common self-inflicted wound on a small school website.
5. What happens after somebody writes to you. Who reads it, how fast they answer, and what the next step is. If you cannot answer this, the form is a suggestion box.

The pages to launch with, and the one job each one does

Seven pages, each with one question to answer and one next step to offer. More pages than this on launch day is procrastination wearing a project plan. Notice that only two of the seven ask for anything.

Applications get a page too, but not a link in the navigation until you are open. A visitor who is three weeks from being ready and meets Apply Now on every page reads the school as anxious about enrollment, which is the one thing a new school cannot afford to look.

The inquiry form: the shortest thing on the site

This is the moment the site either works or does not, and it is almost always over-built. The rules:

1. Six fields, maximum. Your name, your email, your phone if you want to give it, the child's name, their grade or age, and a box for what you would like to know. That is Pearspark's interest form exactly, and the two optional fields are optional on purpose: a family who will not give a phone number to a school they have never visited is not being difficult, they are being normal.
2. Ask nothing you cannot act on this week. Household income, previous school, learning needs, how they heard about you — every one of these is a reason to close the tab, and none of them changes what you do next, which is reply.
3. No CAPTCHA. Making a mother prove she is human is a bad first sentence. Pearspark uses a hidden field bots fill and people never see, plus a cap of thirty new records an hour per school, so the spam problem is handled without asking the family for anything.
4. Put it on your own site, not on a page they have to leave for. Pearspark gives you one iframe and a resize script to paste into a WordPress custom HTML block, a Squarespace code block or a Wix embed. It picks up the school's brand color, font and corner style and sits on a transparent background, so it reads as part of your page rather than a bolted-on widget. There is a link version too, for a school that would rather not embed anything.
5. Say what happens next, on the form, before they submit. "We answer every note within one school day" is worth more than any button copy, and it is a promise you can actually keep at this size.
6. Have an answer for the closed state. When a school switches inquiries off, Pearspark's card shows the office phone number instead of a dead form. Whatever you use, never leave a family at a page that says no with nowhere to go.
7. Keep inquiries open even when applications are closed. These are two different doors and they should have two different switches — a family who finds you in February for a September you have already filled is next year's enrollment, and they will not come back on their own. In Pearspark the two toggles are independent, and a multi-campus school lets the family pick a site, with full sites never listed.

The visit, which is the actual product

Every word on this page is trying to produce one event. Treat it like the event, not like a step in a pipeline.

1. Call it what it is. A visit, a morning with us, come and see it. "Book your admissions consultation" is a sentence no school has ever said out loud, and a family can hear the software it came from.
2. Say what happens, and how long. Where to park, who meets them, whether children come, whether the school is in session, what they will see, and when they will be home. A parent declines an invitation they cannot picture.
3. Offer times, do not negotiate them. Two or three fixed windows a week — Tuesday 9am, Thursday 2pm — published on the page, beats an email thread that takes four messages to find a Wednesday. If you have a scheduling tool, use it; Pearspark does not have one, and we would rather say so than have you discover it in week two.
4. Do not promise a decision at the visit, and do not ask for one. The families who convert best are the ones who leave, talk to each other, and come back — a school that pushes for a yes in the hallway has told them the seats are not really scarce and it is nervous.
5. Write down what you promised, before you forget. The specific thing you said about their specific child in the doorway is the thing they will hold you to in October. Whatever holds your applicant list should hold that note.
6. Give the not-ready family a second door. Some parents will not visit a school with their child in tow, in term time, on a Tuesday. An honest "if you would rather talk on the phone first, here is the number" costs you nothing and keeps the conversation.

The application, and the questions that have to wait

The application is not the inquiry with more boxes. It is a different document with a different purpose, and the most important thing about it is what it does not ask. This is the website's share of it; the process itself — the stages, the dates, the enrollment agreement, the waitlist — is a separate guide, linked below.

1. Do not ask about disability, health, medication, therapies or an IEP before you have made an offer. Ask after. Under the ADA a private school is a place of public accommodation — the statute names nursery, elementary and secondary private schools — and entities controlled by a religious organization are exempt from that title. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice, but the practice is simple, defensible and better for families either way: decide whether to admit the child, then find out what the child needs. Pearspark builds this split into the product: the application form is one stage, the enrollment packet is another, and health, medications, documents and consents live in the packet, which goes out as a signed link once a family is accepted.
2. Ask family questions once. A microschool enrolls siblings, and asking a mother for her address three times because she has three children is the fastest way to make a warm family feel processed. In Pearspark a question can be marked family scope, asked once and attached to every sibling in the same submission.
3. Ask grade-appropriate questions only. A transcript is the point of the application for a seventh grader and does not exist for a five-year-old. Pearspark lets a question be required for some grades and never asked of others, so a kindergarten family is not blocked by a rule that was written for the middle school.
4. Say what the application costs and what it does not buy. If there is a fee, publish it, say whether it is per child, and say plainly that paying it is not a place. Pearspark can take the fee online through Stripe, flat or per student, and records every payment so a refund can be recorded against it rather than a box quietly unticked.
5. Tell them the steps and the calendar before they start. What happens after they submit, roughly how long each stage takes, and when they will hear. A family filling in a form with no idea what week they are in will email you to ask — which is fine, but you wrote the page to prevent exactly that email.
6. Keep files where files belong. Birth certificates, transcripts and immunization records should not arrive as email attachments. In Pearspark an application question can be a file upload, the bytes are encrypted at rest, and each kind of document carries its own read permission, so a transcript and a birth certificate are not visible to the same people by accident.

How to sound like a school and not a pitch

The salesy feeling almost never comes from a single sentence. It comes from a page making claims it cannot support, and the reader noticing.

• Replace every adjective with the thing that made you reach for it. Not "a nurturing environment" — "nine children and two adults, and the same teacher for two years." Not "personalized learning" — "every child has a plan we rewrite every six weeks, and you get a copy." The evidence is always shorter than the adjective and always more persuasive.
• Say who the school is not for, in your own voice, on the site. It is the single strongest trust signal available to a school with no track record, it filters your inquiries for you, and no competitor will copy it.
• Publish the price. If you cannot publish one number, publish the range and the aid path. A family that has to write to find out what it costs will write to the school that published it instead — and you will have spent one of your thirty inquiries answering a question a page could have answered.
• No countdown timers, no "only 3 seats left" unless it is literally true this week, no invented urgency. Scarcity at a microschool is real and does not need help; a fake version of a real thing insults the families who can count.
• No testimonials you do not have yet. A new school with four glowing quotes and no students is doing something a parent can smell. "We opened in August. Ask us anything, and ask the families who joined" is a stronger sentence than any quote you could write.
• Write like the person who will answer the email. If the site is written in a voice the founder does not have, every family who visits gets a small jolt of mismatch at the door. Founder voice, first person, plain words.
• One next step per page, and let it be small. "Read how the days work" is a better ask on a homepage than "Apply now," because it is the ask the reader is actually ready for.

Who does what: the site, the school, and the software

The honest division of labor, gaps included. The middle column is the work no tool does for you, and it is most of the work.

The five numbers, and why the percentages lie at this size

Count these monthly. Count the families, not the rates — at thirty inquiries a year one family moves a conversion rate by three points, and a chart of that will tell you a story that is not there.

1. Inquiries received. The only number your website is directly responsible for.
2. Inquiries answered within one school day. This is the number that most often explains a bad year, and it is the only one on this list you control completely.
3. Families who visited. If inquiries are healthy and visits are not, the problem is the visit page or the invitation, not the top of the site.
4. Applications started. If families visit and do not apply, the answer is in the room, not on the website, and no amount of rewriting will find it.
5. Enrolled. Then read the gaps between the five, in order, and fix the widest one before you touch anything else.

The last check before you launch

The parts of this Pearspark actually holds

The forms, the list behind them, and the money — not the website.

Where to buy something other than Pearspark