New Zealand School of Korea

The New Zealand School of Korea teaches the language to Korean families across the country. I volunteer there as a Year 4 teacher, and this is its website. The home page opens on rows of school photographs panning slowly behind the name, softened to a pastel wash so the words over them stay readable.

The idea

Everything is written in Korean, because that is what these families read. The one place English does real work is enrolment. A parent choosing a class thinks in New Zealand school Years and the school counts in Korean grades, so a table sets the two beside each other.

The palette is pastel throughout, and depth comes from colour and a single hairline rather than a shadow. A sticky row of tabs follows the reader down the about, education and enrolment pages, carrying the same section names across all three.

How it's built

• Astro 5 with static output, so every route is a real HTML file.
• React 19 for the few interactive islands, with TypeScript throughout.
• Tailwind CSS v4, driven by a handful of pastel brand tokens.
• Hosted on Vercel, with the sitemap generated at build.

The photo mosaic

The hero is pure CSS. Three rows pan in alternating directions on their own clocks, the quickest taking a little over two minutes to come back around, and an ivory scrim weighted to the left clears the ground under the copy. The build globs those photographs and encodes them to WebP.

What ships to the browser

Each page renders to HTML and ships no JavaScript unless a piece needs it. The mobile menu, the tabs and the auto scrolling carousels are the only parts that hydrate, so the rest stays static.