A family is not one booking
The arithmetic of a club is different from most local businesses. A parent who books three days at Easter and is happy books the summer, and then October, and then next Easter, and mentions you in a school WhatsApp group on the way. One good first booking is often several hundred pounds of provision over two years, plus the sibling.
That is what the two options should be judged on. Not looks. How many first bookings each one produces, and how easily the second one happens.
The template
A children's activity theme, your colours and logo, a gallery, a contact form, and a button that sends parents to your booking platform.
Cost: a few hundred to a couple of thousand, plus your time.
Time: days rather than weeks.
What you get: a real presence, a domain, and somewhere to point the school newsletter.
Where it leaks: the programme. Templates have no natural place to hold a week made of days, each with an age group, an activity and a price, so almost every club ends up attaching a PDF. The PDF is the leak. A parent on a phone pinches and zooms, cannot tap anything, and either emails you a question or gives up. Add to that a fees page that does not mention vouchers, no place to put arrival and pick-up detail, and booking that throws the parent out to another domain.
The custom build
Built around the parent's actual sequence: which week, which days, how much, do you take my voucher, what does my child need to bring, book.
- Programme pages by week and age group, held as records you edit yourself, with the days bookable from the page describing them.
- Booking from ClassForKids, Sawyer, iPAL or Bookeo embedded and deep-linked per week.
- Registration and consent collected once, with medical, allergy, photo permission and authorised collectors stored and reused.
- A fees and funding page naming the schemes you accept and how to pay with each.
- Arrival, pick-up, late collection and what to bring, stated.
- Staff, ratios and safeguarding shown, with reviews from parents nearby.
- Fast on a phone, findable locally, and tracked so you know which page filled the week.
Cost: the market band is roughly $2,500 to $6,000. Ours is fixed and on pricing.
Time: a few weeks, most of it waiting on your programme and your photographs.
Where the extra bookings come from
Four places, and none of them is the design.
Search timing. Parents plan a holiday two to four weeks out and search then. A site with a page per holiday, published early, is in that search. A site with one page and a PDF is not.
The fee and funding answer. A parent who cannot tell whether you take their voucher does not email you. They open the next club. Naming the schemes on a page of its own converts people you never knew you lost.
Booking that stays put. Every hop to another domain sheds parents, especially in an app browser at half past nine at night.
The second booking. Registration held once means the October booking takes two minutes. That is a habit, and habits are the whole business.
The arithmetic
Take the difference between the two, say two thousand pounds. Then take what a family is worth to you across two years of holidays. For most clubs that is three or four families. If the custom build brings in four families it has paid for itself, and it usually does that in the first summer, because summer is where the volume is.
When the template is right
Your first year, one venue, one holiday programme, and you are filling from a single school gate. Your marketing is a poster and a parents group, not search. You need the money for staff and insurance. Buy the template, keep the domain in your own name, and revisit after your first full summer.
When the template is a leak
You run more than one holiday a year, or after-school provision at several schools. You have days going empty while parents email to ask about vouchers. You re-upload a PDF every holiday and someone still books the wrong age group. You take collection queries by phone all week. You are paying for a booking platform whose parent accounts are barely used because parents never reach them. Every one of those is a fixable thing the template cannot fix.
Deciding
Ask one question: is anything stopping a parent booking today that is the website's fault rather than yours. If a stranger on a phone can see next half term's programme, price their two days, check their voucher works and book without leaving your domain, the template is fine. If any of those is a PDF, a phone call or an email, that is the cost of the template, and it is being paid every holiday.
Where this sits
We build the second option as an after-school and holiday club website, with programme pages, day booking, registration once and a funding page, and the same approach runs through our other childcare and family websites. Start with the template if you are new. Move when the empty Wednesdays and the same three emails start to cost more than the build.