YCA: An EdTech Website Development Case Study

Young Crafts Academy: An EdTech Website Development Case Study 

This EdTech website development case study breaks down how Vrit Technologies built Young Crafts Academy, a kids' coding academy in Nepal, a site designed to do more than look good. The brief was a Next.js website on a headless CMS, a full on-page SEO checklist across every blog and course page, and a content cluster built around four core subjects so the site could earn topical authority rather than compete page by page. If your team is evaluating a development partner for a similar build, this is the actual process, not the pitch-deck version.

At a glance:

The Challenge: A New EdTech Brand That Needed to Rank and Convert

Young Crafts Academy was launching as a new brand in a category where parents do not search for "coding academy," they search for specific things: a grade level, an age range, a subject like Scratch or Python, sometimes just "coding classes for kids in Nepal." A generic marketing site was not going to catch any of that.

The site needed to do three things at once:

• Rank for a wide spread of long-tail, parent-intent searches rather than one or two head terms
• Convert visitors into trial-class bookings across multiple course pages, not just one homepage
• Scale cleanly as the course catalog grew, without every new course or blog post becoming a one-off design job

Our Approach: Building for Topical Authority from Day One

Rather than treating SEO as a pass we would run at the end, we structured the build around it from the start. Four decisions anchored the project:

1. A fast, modern technical foundation. A framework built for performance and a CMS the client's own team could use without touching code.
2. A systematic on-page SEO checklist, applied consistently, not just to the homepage.
3. A content cluster architecture, so course and blog content reinforced each other instead of competing.
4. A standardized visual system, so every new page looked like it belonged on the same site.

The Build: Next.js on a Headless CMS

We built the site on Next.js, which gives fast page loads and strong out-of-the-box support for the technical SEO fundamentals search engines actually reward: clean rendering, image optimization, and structured metadata per page. Pairing it with a headless CMS meant the Young Crafts Academy team could add a new course, update a grade band, or publish a blog post themselves, without filing a dev ticket every time.

That combination matters more for an EdTech brand than it might for a simpler site. Young Crafts Academy's course catalog is organized by grade band (Grade 1 to 3, Grade 4 to 6, Grade 7 to 10) and by subject (Scratch, Python, Web Development, AI, Robotics), which means the page count grows every time a course or a camp is added. A CMS-driven, component-based build was the only way to keep that growth from turning into a maintenance problem.

The On-Page SEO Checklist That Runs Across Every Page

A checklist only works if it is applied everywhere, not just on the pages someone remembers to optimize. We built the following into the site's templates so it applies by default to every blog post and every course page, following the same on-page fundamentals Google itself recommends:

• Title tags under 60 characters, primary keyword placed near the start
• Meta descriptions under 160 characters, written for click-through, not just keyword stuffing
• One H1 per page, with a logical H2/H3 hierarchy underneath
• Descriptive, keyword-relevant alt text on every image
• Clean, consistent URL slugs
• Canonical tags to prevent duplicate-content issues across similar course pages
• FAQ schema on pages with an FAQ section, so answers are eligible for rich results

Templating this at the CMS level, instead of relying on a content editor to remember every field, is what makes it durable. A checklist a person has to remember eventually gets skipped. A checklist built into the page template does not.

The Content Cluster: Turning Scratch, Python, Web Dev, and AI into Topical Hubs

This is where most agency case studies stop short, and where we think the real SEO value in this project lives. Rather than treating the blog as a loose collection of posts, we built it around a pillar-to-hub-to-spoke structure:

Four hubs anchor the structure: Scratch, Python, Web Development and AI, matching Young Crafts Academy's actual course pillars. Every spoke post links back to its hub, and hubs link to the relevant course page, so a parent researching "what is Scratch programming" can land on informational content and be one click from booking a trial class. That interlinking is also what gives the site's SEO durability: individual blog posts can rank or fall in search rankings over time, but the hub structure keeps building authority underneath them.

Catching and Fixing an Early Image Consistency Problem

Not every part of a build goes perfectly on the first pass, and this is worth including because most case studies leave it out. Early in content production, cover images across course and blog pages were coming in at inconsistent dimensions and crops, some landscape, some closer to square, depending on who sourced the image and when.

On a content-heavy, growing site, that kind of inconsistency compounds. Left alone, it would have meant a visibly patchy-looking blog and course catalog within a few months. We caught it during an early content review, then fixed it at the system level rather than image by image:

• Defined a standard aspect ratio and dimension set for every cover image type (course cards, blog covers, hub headers)
• Built the sizing requirement into the CMS's image upload step, so it is enforced going forward, not just corrected retroactively
• Re-processed the existing early images to bring them in line with the new standard

It is a small thing in isolation, but it is the kind of small thing that either gets caught in week three or gets noticed by a visitor in month six.

The Outcome: A Site Built to Grow With the Brand

Young Crafts Academy's site is live today at youngcraftsacademy.com, and the structure reflects the work described above: grade-banded course pages, subject hubs for Scratch, Python, Web Development, and AI, a blog built on that cluster, an FAQ section with matching schema, and a consistent visual system across a catalog that has continued to grow since launch.

We are not going to attach invented traffic or ranking numbers to this case study. What we can say plainly is that the site was built so its SEO performance compounds rather than resets every time new content is added, which is the actual goal of a content cluster strategy, and the reason it is worth doing properly the first time.

How to Choose a Software Development Partner for Your Own EdTech Build

If you are evaluating agencies for a similar project, a few questions tend to separate a partner who thinks about content architecture from one who only thinks about design:

• Do they talk about how pages will interlink, or only about how individual pages will look?
• Do they have a repeatable on-page SEO checklist, or does SEO get handled ad hoc after launch?
• Do they mention a plan for consistency as the site scales, or only for the pages that exist on day one?
• Can your own team update content after launch, or does every change route back through the agency?

Our services page covers the full range of what we build, from web and app development to AI-powered features and staff augmentation for teams that need to move faster than their current headcount allows. You can also read more about our approach and team if you want the fuller picture before reaching out.

Ready to Build Something Similar?

Whether you need a full EdTech build like this one or want a content cluster strategy layered onto an existing site, the process behind it does not really change: understand how your specific audience actually searches, build the site architecture around that from day one instead of retrofitting it later, and bake the SEO checklist into the page templates so it holds up automatically as the site grows, rather than depending on someone remembering to run it. That is the approach behind every project we take on, not a one-off playbook for EdTech clients, which is also why teams tend to come back to us for the next course, the next product line, or the next market instead of starting over with a new agency each time. Start a conversation with Vrit Technologies and we will walk through what your project actually needs, not a generic package.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does a project like this typically take?

It depends on scope, but a build combining a custom site, a full on-page SEO checklist, and a content cluster strategy is a multi-week engagement rather than a quick turnaround. The technical build and the SEO architecture happen in parallel, not one after the other, which keeps the overall timeline shorter than doing them as separate phases.

What is a content cluster and why does it matter for SEO?

A content cluster is a pillar page on a broad topic, supported by narrower posts that link back to it and to each other. Instead of dozens of unrelated blog posts each fighting for their own small slice of search traffic, the cluster concentrates topical authority in the hub, which tends to perform better in search over time than isolated posts.

What does an on-page SEO checklist actually include?

At minimum: title tags and meta descriptions written for every page, a logical heading hierarchy, descriptive alt text on images, clean URLs, canonical tags, and structured data like FAQ schema where relevant. The part that matters is applying it consistently across every page, not just the homepage.

Do we need a headless CMS, or is a platform like WordPress fine?

It depends on how much your content will grow and how much control your team wants over the front-end experience. A headless CMS paired with a framework like Next.js tends to make sense once you are managing a large, structured content catalog, like a course library, and want fast page performance alongside easy content editing.

Can Vrit Technologies maintain the site after launch, or is it a one-time build?

We build sites so a client's own team can manage day-to-day content through the CMS, and we also offer ongoing support and staff augmentation for teams that want an extra hand post-launch. Which arrangement makes sense depends on your team's size and how often the site will change.

What if we already have a website and just need the SEO or content cluster work?

That is a common starting point too. A content cluster strategy and an on-page SEO checklist can often be layered onto an existing site without a full rebuild, depending on how the current site is structured.