The document everyone makes
It is usually built in a spreadsheet or a design app, one page per week, days across the top, activities in the boxes, prices in the corner and the booking email at the bottom. It is exported as a PDF, uploaded, and linked from the home page as Summer Programme.
It is a good document. It is a poor web page, and it is quietly the most expensive thing on most club websites.
What it costs you
Parents on phones give up. A PDF laid out for A4 arrives on a five inch screen as a wall. Pinch, zoom, drag, lose your place. A parent doing this at half past nine at night with two weeks to cover often closes it and opens the next club.
Search cannot use it. A parent searching for a holiday club in your town in the week they are planning will be shown pages, and your programme is not one. The content that would win that search is sitting inside a file.
Nothing in it is tappable. The parent has read the Wednesday, decided, and now has to go and find the booking somewhere else and select the week again. Every one of those steps sheds people.
It goes stale invisibly. A week fills, a trip changes venue, a price moves. The PDF is still the old one, because updating it means reopening the design file and re-exporting. Parents book what the PDF said and then email you.
It generates your inbox. Which age group is this for, is Wednesday full, does the price include the trip. Every question the layout could not fit becomes an email in the week you have least time.
What replaces it
A page per holiday period, and where your age groups run genuinely different programmes, a page per age group inside it.
Each page carries the same information as the PDF, written as text a phone reflows and a search engine reads. The week is listed day by day. Each day says what is happening, which age group it is for, what it costs and whether anything special is needed, such as a kit or a packed lunch. Beside each day, or at least beside each week, sits a book button that opens your booking platform on that week with the selection already made.
Underneath, a short block linking to fees and funding, to arrival and pick-up, and to what to bring. Two lines from a parent who came last summer, near the button.
Hold it as records, not as a page you retype
This is the part that decides whether the system survives contact with a busy August.
Model a holiday as a record with a name and dates, containing days, and each day carrying an activity description, an age band, a price and any note. Then the page builds itself from those records, and publishing next Easter means filling in a form rather than laying out a page. Anyone in your office can do it in an afternoon.
Done that way, the same records feed the summary card on the home page, the list of upcoming holidays, and next year's page, which starts as a copy of this one.
Keep the PDF, demote it
Parents genuinely do want something to print and stick on the fridge, and staff want something to carry. So generate the PDF from the same information and offer it as a download at the bottom of the page.
The rule is the order. The page is the programme. The PDF is a convenience. Never the reverse, and never a link to a PDF as the only route to the programme.
Publish earlier than feels necessary
The main advantage of pages over documents is that they can be found in the fortnight parents are actually planning, which is roughly two to four weeks before the holiday and earlier for summer. That only helps if the page exists by then.
Get the page up as soon as the shape of the week is settled, even if a couple of trips are still to be confirmed, and mark those as to be confirmed. A page with two gaps in it beats no page, and it beats a PDF that appears the week before.
Keep the old ones
Do not delete last October's page when the holiday passes. Mark it as past, leave the content, and link to the current one. Those pages accumulate history that helps your site be found, and they show a parent that you have been running this for years.
Where this sits
Programme pages by week and age group, held as records you can edit yourself and bookable day by day, are the spine of an after-school and holiday club website as we build it, alongside the other childcare and family websites we make. What each package covers is on pricing. The programme is the product. It should not be an attachment.