Summit Business School

About the Project

A modern website to showcase Summit's fully online programs and flexible self-paced learning options. Built with the Astro framework and Sanity CMS.

ClientJetina Sousa

IndustryEducation

Areas of work

Web designWeb developmentCMS

Technologies we used

Stripe

Astro

React

Sanity

Netlify

Figma

Introduction

The birth of Summit Business School

Summit Business School, a new and fully online institution, is dedicated to empowering professionals worldwide with flexible, self-paced learning. Their vision demanded a website that not only reflected their global and modern approach but also to show all courses available for enrollment.

We never say no to a challenge, so we started crafting a high-performance website that merged bold design with robust functionality.

About the Design

Designing with Meaning: A Bold and Dynamic Interface

To encapsulate Summit’s vision, we harnessed the brand’s bold colors and blended them with geometric patterns, subtly drawing inspiration from African design elements — an influence the client specifically wanted to integrate. We believe this visual language brings a unique cultural depth to the brand, reinforcing its identity in a vibrant and modern way.

About the Animations

Education in motion

Using the powerful JavaScript library GSAP made it incredibly easy to create high-performance animations. It helped us tremendously in bringing some dynamism and movement to the website.

We invested mainly in animating the symbols, which are the strongest graphic element, in drawing the brand's logo in the hero and finally added entry animations linked to the scroll to most sections of the website, ensure subtle motion everywhere.

The following video showcases the animations in the homepage, but it's always better to see them for yourself so be sure to visit the website.

The Power of Astro: Performance at Its Core

Summit’s website needed to be fast, lightweight, and efficient, catering to a global audience with varying internet speeds. To achieve this, we built the site using the Astro framework.

Astro’s architecture allowed us to drastically reduce JavaScript overhead, ensuring lightning-fast load times without compromising on interactivity. The result is a website that maintains a sleek and responsive experience across all devices, maximizing user engagement and accessibility.

Sanity CMS: Empowering Content Management Like Never Before

This project required a powerful and adaptable content management system. As always, we turned to Sanity, leveraging its flexibility to build a fully customized CMS that meets Summit’s specific needs.

Advanced Form Management

Forms play a crucial role in Summit’s workflow—whether for course inquiries, enrollments, or payment flows. The CMS allows the client to:

Create unlimited forms with customizable fields

Want to create several forms, each one with its own purpose? Easy. Peasy. You can build as many forms as you need and choose what you need the fields to be, e.g. Selects, Message Fields, Upload Files, Checkboxes, you name it.

Define automated actions upon submission

If you are going to have forms, then you should be able to decide right in the CMS what will happen upon submission. Do you want to integrate with your CRM? Download a file? Trigger an email? It is all possible now.

Personalize transactional emails with placeholders for user-specific data

In addition to being able to edit all transactional emails within the CMS, such as emails to remind clients of an Abandoned Cart and Payment Confirmations, it is also possible to customize emails with placeholders, like Name, Course name, etc. This way, emails become more personal and your brand appears friendlier.

Easy to build forms field by field, with email and phone number validations, and field ids for integration with CRM of choice. Also allows picking actions on form submission.

Course admission forms have complex flows, but all content is editable inside Sanity

Example fields for the payment screen

Replay email fields, with placeholder support, allowing the use of data input into the form in a previous step to be used inside the email content.

Thank you screen inside the website, also with placeholder support

Flexible vs Semi-Structured Pages

Summit’s website needed to strike a balance between flexibility and consistency. On one hand, we wanted to give the client total freedom to build unique pages like the Homepage or About Us page using a wide range of modules. On the other hand, some pages — like the Course Pages — needed to follow a consistent structure to help users easily navigate and compare different programs.

That’s where our smart CMS setup came in. Each Course Page starts with a structured layout that ensures all the essential info is always presented clearly and in the same way across the board. But not every course needs the exact same content. So, we made it flexible: certain sections (like Admission Requirements) are only shown when they’re relevant. And after those core sections, the client can add as many custom sections as they want — from testimonials to FAQs to image galleries.

There’s a whole library of modules to choose from:

But wait, there's more!...

If you are still reading, then perhaps you also would like to know that we also built these two features:

Effortless Landing Page Creation

The system allows Summit to generate standalone landing pages for individual courses, complete with customizable CTAs that integrate directly with the payment flow — streamlining the enrollment process.

Icon Picker

To maintain design consistency, we integrated multiple icon libraries, ensuring that designers control the selection while giving administrators a broad range of options.

Seamless Functionality: Payments, Compliance, and More

A truly effective online school requires more than just beautiful design and structured content — it must offer a smooth, trustworthy user experience. To that end, we incorporated several key integrations:

Stripe Integration: Ensuring secure and hassle-free transactions, enabling students worldwide to enroll with confidence.
Consent Modal: A robust GDPR-compliant consent management tool, giving users full control over third-party data collection and privacy settings.

Conclusion: A Platform Built for Growth

The new Summit Business School website is more than just an online presence — it’s a dynamic, scalable learning hub designed for the future. By merging compelling design, a performance-driven framework, and a powerful CMS, we believe we've delivered a platform that not only meets but exceeds Summit’s needs.

We are confident that with this foundation in place, Summit Business School is now equipped to grow, adapt, and continue inspiring professionals around the world.