What we are building
A page for each holiday period, readable on a phone, listing every day with its activity, age group and price, with booking attached to the day it describes. Held as records so you can publish next Easter yourself in an afternoon, without opening a design app or emailing anyone a document.
Ten steps. Do them in order.
1. Write down the shape of a holiday
Before anything is built, describe your provision in your own words. How many weeks. Whether you sell whole weeks, single days, or both. Whether a day is one price for everyone or varies by age. Whether there is an early drop-off or a late collection sold separately. Whether trips carry a supplement.
Everything after this is modelling that description, so get it right rather than tidy.
2. Decide the age groups
Most clubs run two or three: something like four to seven, eight to eleven, and a teen or leadership group. Write the boundary rule down, including what you do about a child who is about to have a birthday and about siblings who want to be together.
The age group is a field on every day, so a parent can filter to the child in front of them, and so your register comes out right.
3. Model it as records
A holiday record has a name, a start and end date, a venue and a status. Inside it, a day record has a date, a title, a description of the activity, an age group, a price, a capacity note and an optional what to bring line.
Modelled that way, the page renders itself. You add a holiday and its days, and the summary card on the home page, the upcoming list and the page all update together. If a developer proposes hand-built pages instead, that is the thing that quietly stops working next year.
4. Set it up in the booking platform first
Build the sessions in ClassForKids, Sawyer, iPAL or Bookeo before the website goes near it, because the platform's model of a session is the constraint everything else has to fit.
Get the capacities and the age groups matching what you wrote in step two, and make sure the naming matches too, so a parent reading Week 2, ages eight to eleven on your page sees the same words in the basket.
5. Deep-link every day
Get the platform's link for each week and, where it supports it, each session, and store that on the day record. Now the button beside Wednesday opens Wednesday.
Where the platform offers an embed or a widget, embed it on the holiday page so parents stay on your domain. Where it does not, at least send them to a pre-selected week rather than a calendar.
6. Add the price and the total honestly
Show the day price and the week price where both exist, and say plainly what is included. If a trip day costs more, put the supplement on that day rather than in a footnote. If early drop-off or late collection are extra, list them once beneath the week with their prices.
A parent adding it up should reach the same number as the checkout. When they do not, they stop.
7. Attach the funding and fees link
Beneath the price block, a short line naming the childcare payment schemes you accept, linking to your fees and funding page. This is the second most common reason a parent leaves a programme page, after not being able to read it.
8. Attach arrival, pick-up and what to bring
A link to the plain page covering the drop-off window, the latest collection, who may collect and what the child needs. Where a specific day needs a kit, put that on the day itself as well.
9. Lay it out for a phone
The week as a vertical list of days, not a grid. Each day: date, title, one or two lines of description, the age group, the price, the button. Headings that let a parent skim to their child's age group. Images compressed and sized, and the booking script loaded on this page rather than site-wide, so the page appears in about a second on mobile data.
Then test it in the in-app browser inside Facebook and Instagram, which is where a good share of your parents will open it.
10. Publish early, then keep it
Get the page up as soon as the shape of the week is settled, two to four weeks before parents plan and earlier for summer, marking anything unconfirmed as to be confirmed. A page with two gaps beats no page.
When the holiday passes, do not delete it. Mark it past, leave the content, and link to the current holiday. Those pages build up history that helps the site be found and shows a parent you have been doing this for years.
Set a reminder for the week you should publish the next one. That reminder is worth more than most of the design.
Where this sits
Programme pages built as records, deep-linked to your booking platform and published early, are how we set up an after-school and holiday club website, and the same approach carries across our other childcare and family websites. What each package covers is on pricing. Build it so you can publish next summer without ringing anyone.