Solika Arts Site And Portals

Solika Arts is a creative arts studio in Nairobi. I ran the public website and the four portal system behind it as two products rather than one project, because four audiences needed four answers.

The problem

Solika Arts had no online presence at all. Parents couldn't see class details or book a session, so everything ran on word of mouth. That's two problems rather than one: a studio with nothing public to point at, and a back office running on spreadsheets.

The studio runs children's and adult art classes out of a mall in Nairobi. Terms, class sizes, instructors, attendance and payment lived in spreadsheets and in one founder's head. That works until the studio grows, and then it stops working all at once.

The awkward part was never the data. It was that an admin, a parent, an instructor and an adult student each need a different thing out of the same rows.

What I did

I treated the site and the system as two products, not one project

The public page and the back office answer different questions for different people. The site has to make a warm, in person studio legible to a parent who has never walked in. The system has to make a term of admin survivable. Designing them as one thing would have compromised both, so they share a brand and nothing else.

I built four portals instead of one dashboard with role switches

One interface with permissions behind it would have been cheaper to build and worse to use. Each audience gets its own entry, its own vocabulary, and only the actions it can actually take.

I turned the bug list into a triaged product rather than a chat thread

Issues arrive through a form with owner and severity attached, so the developer receives a brief rather than a message, and nothing is lost between calls.

What shipped

The public site carries the studio’s vision, the class offerings, a live weekly schedule and a persistent book a class route, and it was designed and built in Framer.

Behind it sit four portals covering admin, parent, instructor and adult student, with terms, class categories, instructor profiles and enrolment, plus a hub carrying the contract, the rates, the request forms and the issue board in one place.

Go live is held on the studio’s own mobile payment account, which is the one dependency that was never mine to clear.