TechTown

A platform that brings schools, companies and students together needs to do three things at once. Teachers need to quickly find relevant activities for their class. Students need to get excited about engineering. Companies and partners must be able to present themselves as involved in education.

The breadth of content was great, from extracurricular activities to internships to support for teachers. This included a concrete logistical question: many activities take place on location at a company or partner, so distance from the school is an important factor for a teacher planning a visit.

STO Rotterdam wanted a platform that makes this complexity manageable without feeling like a bureaucratic system. Attractive for young people, accessible for teachers and working as a visibility platform for partners.

We started the project with wireframes. Before even one pixel was designed, we laid down the basic structure of the website and tested it with STO Rotterdam. This approach gave us early assurance that we had the right concept and avoided having to make major changes to elaborate designs at a later stage.

After agreeing on the wireframes, we designed and built the full website. Craft CMS as the basis for content management, Tailwind CSS for the front-end styling and Barba.js for fluid page transitions that give the website a modern and fast look. The content structure is designed so that STO Rotterdam can independently add and manage activities, partners, news items and calendar entries.

The platform consists of two main sections. The student part presents activities in a way that connects with young people's world, focusing on themes such as climate, sustainability and circular economy. The teacher part focuses on the practical side: which activities are suitable for which class and how to get them organised.

On the Offerings for Students and Offerings for Teachers pages, we built in a postcode functionality that specifically matches how schools search for activities. A teacher enters the school's postcode, then the extracurricular activities are sorted by distance from that school. Each activity thereby shows the commuting distance in kilometres.

Activities that take place on site at the school, where the activity provider comes to the school, are automatically assigned 0 km. Those always come out on top, regardless of where the company itself is located. This makes sense from a teacher's perspective: if there is no need to travel, distance is no longer a factor.

This functionality sounds simple but requires thoughtful implementation. The geocoding of postcodes, the distance calculation, the exception logic for on-location activities and the performance with large numbers of results, all things that need to work seamlessly without the user noticing.

Craft CMS as the basis for all content management. Tailwind CSS for front-end styling, fully compliant with TechTown's corporate identity. Barba.js for smooth page transitions and a modern user experience. Postcode-based distance calculation with celestial sorting. Exception logic for on-location activities that default to 0 km. Extensive filtering functionality in addition to distance sorting. Responsive design for desktop, tablet and mobile.

Since January 2026, the platform has been live and TechTown fills it with content independently. There are now 33 schools and 17 companies and partners active on the platform. Teachers can instantly find relevant activities in their region through the postcode functionality. Students get an attractive picture of what engineering is all about. Partners get visibility with schools actively looking for extracurricular activities.

The platform is designed to grow with them. New functionalities such as a lesson card selector are already in the planning and can be expanded on the existing base without having to change the structure of the website.

Starting with wireframes is often quicker than it seems. The time you invest in validating the structure before designing pays off several times over in the follow-up process. No surprises at a late stage, no design changes already translated into code and no complicated discussions afterwards about what was actually intended.

In addition, this project taught us again that the most valuable functionality is often the least visible. Postcode sorting is not a feature that has marketing value, but for a teacher planning a field trip, it is the difference between using and not using the platform.