The honest version
Most club managers who ask about a website are not worried about the website. They are worried about doing it while running sessions every afternoon and planning a holiday programme at the same time.
So here is the shape of a club build, stage by stage, with the parts that need you marked. Total time from you, spread over about six weeks: a first call, one session working out the programme and fees, one photography morning, and two rounds of feedback. Everything else happens without you.
The one piece of timing advice: build in the quiet part of a term, not in the fortnight before a holiday programme has to go on sale.
Stage 1: the first conversation
Half an hour on a call. What we are establishing:
- What you run. Breakfast club, after-school, holiday weeks, inset day cover, and which of those are term-time only.
- Ages and groups, capacity per group, and the ratios that set that capacity.
- Where you operate from, and whether it is one site or several.
- How you sell time. Day, week, half day, blocks, ad hoc, and the sibling and early booking discounts.
- Which payment routes you accept, including any childcare account, voucher or subsidy scheme you are registered for, and any locally funded places you deliver.
- What you book on now: ClassForKids, Sawyer, iPAL, Bookeo, a spreadsheet, or a phone that rings during pick-up.
- Your registration or approval, and whether the current site shows it.
- The calls you are sick of taking. For nine clubs out of ten this is a voucher question or a can-I-book-just-Tuesday question.
You get a written scope, a price and a date after that call. Our tiers are on the pricing page, and for a club with programme pages, booking, registration and funding pages the answer is usually the one that covers more than eight pages.
Stage 2: the programme and fees session
This is the homework, and it is the piece that changes your phone calls.
We send two grids. The first is your session structure: every bookable unit, its times, its age group and its capacity. The second is the fee table: day rate, week rate, half day, extended hours, inset day, sibling discount, and what is included in each.
Then the money routes. Every scheme you accept, your provider reference, the payment reference a parent must quote, and the lead time before a place is released.
Most managers do this in one sitting. It is built as editable records, so changing a price later takes two minutes and no developer.
Stage 3: photography
Half a morning, booked around a session you are happy to have photographed.
What we want: the hall or room, the outdoor space, the entrance a parent actually uses at drop-off, the equipment, the food setup, and the team. Children only where you hold current photograph consent, and we will build the page to work either way, because plenty of clubs sensibly choose not to.
If a photographer is not in budget, a good phone in daylight is genuinely fine, and we will tell you which twelve shots to take.
Stage 4: design direction
We show the home page and one programme page as mock-ups. You look on your phone, gather everyone's comments into one list, and send the list once. We revise, you look again, we revise again, and the direction is agreed. Two rounds is plenty when comments arrive together.
What we are checking: can a parent see a programme, a price and a Book button without scrolling, and does the club look like somewhere their child would be happy.
Stage 5: build
Two to three weeks. The pages, in the order they earn their keep:
Home. This holiday's programme, with a page per holiday and one for term-time provision. Fees and funding. Book. Registration. Arrival and pick-up. Our team and safeguarding. Reviews from parents. Contact.
The arrival and pick-up page does more quiet work than anything else on a club site. Which door, what time, where to park, what the collection password is for, what happens if a parent is late. We draft it from the first call and send it to you to correct.
Stage 6: wiring the booking
Your platform is configured or checked against the site: sessions as your real units, capacity per age group, sibling discounts automatic, registration and consent required before the first session and reused after it, payment routes including the non-card ones, booking cut-offs, waiting lists that release cancelled places, and confirmation emails carrying the dates, the entrance and what to bring.
Then a test child is booked from a phone, end to end, including inside an in-app browser, because a lot of your traffic arrives from a link in a bio.
Stage 7: review and launch
You get a staging link. Same rule: comments consolidated, sent once, two rounds. Read the fees page and the arrival page as a parent would, because those two cost you money when they are wrong.
Launch is a quiet weekday morning. We move the domain, keep the old addresses redirecting so nothing you have posted in a school newsletter or a Facebook group breaks, submit the sitemap and watch it for the day.
Stage 8: the first holiday
A walkthrough video showing you how to publish next holiday's programme, change a price and swap a photograph, because you will do that four times a year and should never have to ask us.
Then a check after the first programme goes on sale: booking clicks by page against completed bookings, which tells you which week is selling and which page needs a clearer price or finish time.
Where this sits
That is the process behind every after-school and holiday club website we build, and the same eight stages, with different homework, run behind the other childcare websites we make. The parts that matter for a club: the fee table and the funding routes settled early, real photographs of your own room, and the booking platform wired so registration and consent arrive long before the child does.