Why Does My School Website Keep Breaking?

You updated something, or maybe you didn't update anything, and now half the course doesn't work. A plugin conflict. A theme that stopped talking to the quiz module. A page that looks fine on your laptop and completely broken on a student's phone. This is the most common complaint from teachers who built their own online course, and it's not your fault.

Why it keeps happening

Platforms like Moodle and WordPress are built on layers. Your content sits on top of a theme, which sits on top of plugins, which sit on top of the platform itself. Every time any layer updates and they update constantly something can break. The more features you've added, the more things can go wrong.

Google Classroom is more stable but far more limited. You can share files and set assignments, but you can't build a real course structure, track mastery scores, or have students submit lab reports in a useful way.

The alternative

A course built in clean, self-contained code has none of these layers. There's no plugin ecosystem, no theme dependencies, nothing phoning home to a third-party server. When it's built, it works. Next Monday it still works. Next year it still works.

What that looks like in practice

At devstem.org we build courses from your existing materials — PDFs, PowerPoints, worksheets — in vanilla JavaScript with no dependencies. Once delivered, the course runs on any device and nothing breaks unless you ask us to change something.

One build. You own it completely.

Try a live example

See a course built from a real teacher's science materials at devstem.org.