Client Brief

Stepping Stones Day Nursery is a privately owned nursery in Boothtown, Halifax. They provide full and part-time places for children aged 0-11 years. Within easy reach of Halifax and Bradford, they offer a drop off and pick up service to most local schools. The nursery is Ofsted inspected, registered and approved and all the staff are fully qualified or working toward qualification.

The nursery records the developments of all the children in their care, which is available for parents to view at any time. A large adventure outdoor play area with safety matting promotes physical development and healthy children. They also like to get the children out into the community with visits to local shops, library, parks and museums. Diet is also an important consideration and fresh, healthy meals are prepared at the nursery.

Target Group

Mainly working mothers, aged 20-40. Middle to working class, they are parents of babies, toddlers, pre-school and school children.

Decisions to send children to the nursery are generally carefully considered and compared to the local competition. Factors can be price, location, child safety and welfare, nutrition and staff qualifications. A visitation is normally carried out before booking, where emotional factors come into play, such as friendliness of staff, happiness of the children, room organisation and general parental instinct.

Ofsted are also a target as the nursery needs to maintain their good report.


Competition
Stepping Stones’ main competition are the local nurseries Tot Spot in Dean Clough, Halifax, Tiny Tots in Boothtown and Sure Start nurseries. Tot Spot do have a fun, lively and interactive website however it is not positioned well in Google. Tiny Tots does not appear to have a website at all!

In Stepping Stones’ opinion they’re stronger than the competition in regards to their friendliness and professionalism. Also they have Step One of a Quality Assurance Scheme which is difficult to achieve and don’t believe many other nurseries have this.

If the website alone was the first contact with the nursery, then Tiny Tots would currently give the best first impression.


Current Website
Designed by a company specialising in educational websites, the current website does not promote a strong corporate identity. The site displays a dull background colour, incomplete logo and hard to read telephone number and address. The content has to be added by the nursery owner, David Marsden, through a piece of software called Contribute. As David is unfamiliar with the software, he finds it very difficult to use, hence the uploaded material is visually lacklustre and badly organised. A couple of pages are also empty.


Website Redesign Requirements

• Develop a corporate identity based around the existing logo


• Tie together the logo, name and brand throughout the website and PDFs


• Create a professional, lively, colourful website design


• Communicate the importance to the nursery of the children’s wellbeing


• Online forms that email information direct to the nursery


• All future amendments to be carried out by Refreshing Web Design and responsibility taken away from the owner. Examples are newsletter updates and price changes


• Achieve a good position in Google’s natural search results to generate more enquiries. This would enable savings in other areas of marketing eg Thomson and Yellow Pages


• Keep the same web address