Questions to ask before you hire anyone for a school website

Vendor demos are charming. Contracts are where schools get stuck. Use this checklist before you hire an agency, a freelancer, or a rental partner — including us.

Outcomes, not themes

1. **Can a parent Register on a phone in under five minutes?** If the demo is only a slideshow, keep looking. 2. **Where does tuition or deposit money go?** It should go to your school or club. If a middleman holds funds, understand why. 3. **Who updates calendar, fees, and staff bios after launch?** If the answer is "your intern," price that labor. 4. **What happens on cancel?** Content export? Contacts? Does design leave with them? Get it in writing. 5. **Is mobile enrollment a real form or a PDF download?** PDFs recreate office chaos.

Operations boundaries

6. **Are you selling a public site or ops software?** Attendance and clearance are not the same job as marketing. Mixing them muddies scope. 7. **Will you train every teacher on a website builder?** Training cost is real — often larger than the theme fee. 8. **How fast do updates ship during admissions season?** Ask for a plain process, not a vibe.

Money and messaging

9. **What are the commercial terms in one paragraph?** For CCCM working sites: **$149 first month, then $99/month, three-month minimum**, checkout at https://www.getcccm.com/checkout. Clubs: https://www.getcccm.com/sports. Other vendors should be equally clear. 10. **Do you invent client logos in the pitch?** Demand honesty. We label invented samples as invented and do not call people clients they are not. 11. **How do you handle email follow-up?** Honest email: leaving the list must be easy and honored. If a vendor sneers at that, expect spammy habits elsewhere.

Academy OS note (so you do not confuse products)

If someone pitches staff attendance software, that may be useful — but it is not a Register website. CCCM Academy OS is talk-first at https://www.getcccm.com/academy-os with **no public OS checkout price**. Do not let a demo blur the two.

Invented sample (not a client)

"North Gate Classical (invented) asked five vendors where deposits go and who updates tuition in January. Two could not answer without a slide. They chose a CCCM working site rental with public terms and a phone-friendly Register path." Invented — not a live school.

Red flags

- "We'll custom-build a portal" before you have a public URL - No cancel story - Fake case studies - Pressure to skip reading terms - Prices that only appear after a discovery gauntlet for a simple brochure (ops tools may need conversation; a basic marketing site usually should not)

Accessibility and basics

Ask whether pages work on small phones, whether forms fail gracefully, and whether you can publish an admissions timeline without a developer ticket. Fancy parallax does not enroll families. Working Register does.

References without fantasy

Ask for references you can actually contact — or accept labeled invented samples as education only. Anyone selling live client fairy tales without proof is showing you how they market, not how they maintain sites.

Plain next step

Use the checklist on us too. Checkout when ready: https://www.getcccm.com/checkout or https://www.getcccm.com/sports. Questions: hello@getcccm.com. For ops desk needs, https://www.getcccm.com/academy-os — conversation first.