The honest version
A day nursery website is not a hard build. It is a build that stalls, and it almost always stalls in the same two places: photography of the rooms, and a decision about what to publish on fees.
Everything else moves at whatever pace the manager can give it, which during a term is about two hours a week. A realistic run is six to ten weeks from first conversation to live, and the weeks that go missing are the ones waiting on the two things above.
Stage one: the first conversation
Half an hour, and mostly questions. How many rooms and what ages. Your capacity and your current occupancy per room. Which rooms have a waiting list and which have gaps, because that changes what the site is being asked to do. What runs your enquiries now, whether that is Famly, Blossom, Kinderly, a spreadsheet or a notebook by the phone. Who answers the phone and when. And what happened at your last inspection.
That last question is not nosiness. A recent strong report is a headline. A weaker one is a page that needs writing carefully. Either way it shapes the home page, so it belongs in the first call.
Stage two: fees and funding, decided early
This is the decision that holds up more nursery builds than anything else, so we make it first rather than last.
You need to settle: whether you publish rates, which session types you offer and what hours each covers, what the fee includes, what is charged separately, and how you describe the funded hours you deliver. Owners often want to think about this. Thinking about it in week one costs a week. Thinking about it in week six costs six.
We build the fee table as records with an effective-from date, so the annual rise later is an edit rather than a redesign.
Stage three: photography
The single biggest difference between a nursery site that fills viewings and one that does not, and the stage that needs the most from you.
You need a photographer for a day, in the setting, on a normal day, with consents sorted in advance. Every room, the garden in ordinary weather, the entrance, the sleep room, the change area, mealtimes, the resources on the shelves. Faces only where consent is current, and plenty of strong frames with no identifiable child at all.
Book the day before the design starts, not after. Sorting consent letters takes a fortnight and it is the part nurseries underestimate.
Stage four: the words that only you have
While photography is being arranged, we collect the things nobody outside the nursery can write.
Staff records per room, with names, roles, qualifications and how long they have been with you. Ratios per age band. The safeguarding lead and deputy. Registration number, regulator, rating and the link to the report. A week of real menus. The shape of an actual day in each room, hour by hour, because a day in the life page written from a template reads like one.
This arrives as a shared document you fill in between sessions. It is the part that takes your two hours a week.
Stage five: design and build
Design comes back on the home page, a room page and the fees page first, since those three carry the whole site. One round of comments, then the rest is built to the agreed pattern rather than reviewed page by page.
Two revision rounds is normal and is enough when the content is settled. Sites that need five rounds are sites where stage two was skipped.
Stage six: wiring the enquiries
One page carries the enquiry or waitlist form, pointed at whichever platform you run. Viewing slots go against the manager's real calendar. Buttons for both sit in the header on every page, and on a phone in a bar at the bottom.
Then we configure the fields to match the site exactly, set the auto-reply in your voice, and name a person who owns the enquiry list. That last one is yours to decide and it matters more than any setting.
Stage seven: review and launch
You get a link and a checklist rather than an open invitation to comment. Check the fees, check the staff names and spellings, check the ratios, check the rating and the report link, check the safeguarding page, and submit a test enquiry from your own phone.
Then it goes live, redirects from the old URLs are put in place, and the search and mapping listings are updated so the phone number and hours agree with the site.
Stage eight: the first term
Watch two numbers for a term: enquiry form submissions and taps on the call button, split by the page they came from. That tells you whether the rooms page or the fees page is doing the persuading.
Then diary a termly review of the things that go stale on a nursery site faster than anywhere else: staff who have left, rating and report links after an inspection, fee records before a rise, menus, and the waitlist wording once a room's queue changes shape.
Where this sits
That is the process we run on a day nursery website, and it is the same one behind our other childcare and family websites. What each package covers, and how the revision rounds work, is on pricing. Settle the fees, book the photographer, and the rest of it moves.