Web Hosting for Daycare Centers

Photographs of children, and why location changes everything

This is the part of a daycare website that can genuinely hurt somebody, and it is worth being blunt about it.

A photograph of a happy room is the most persuasive thing you can put on the page. It is also a photograph of a specific child, published on the open internet, on a page that says exactly where that child is between seven and six, five days a week. Those two facts sit on top of each other. A family photo on a fridge is private. The same photo on your website is a location.

Most of the time nothing comes of it. The case that does come of it is a custody dispute, or a parent who moved away from someone, and your smiling group shot is how they were found. That is the failure to design around, because you will not know which family it applies to. Parents in that situation very often do not tell you.

A policy you can actually keep

• Get written consent per family, separately for the website and for social media. They are different exposures and a parent may say yes to one and no to the other.
• Treat consent as revocable, and make it easy to revoke. Someone's circumstances change without warning.
• Keep a list of which children may not appear, and check it before anything is published. If the list lives in one person's head, it fails the week that person is off.
• Prefer photographs of the space, of hands and activities, of the backs of heads. They sell the room without identifying anyone.
• Never publish a child's full name next to their face. Never publish a class list.
• Strip location data from photographs before uploading. Phones embed it, and most site software does not remove it for you.

Removing a photo from your website does not remove it from search engine caches, from a scraper, or from whoever downloaded it. Assume a published photo is permanent. That is the reason the decision happens before you upload, not after a complaint.

It is also worth deciding who is allowed to publish. A staff member posting from their own phone at nap time is how the policy gets bypassed, and no hosting arrangement can prevent that. One person with the login, and one place photographs go through, is the whole control.

The waiting list is the conversion, not the phone call

Daycare is unusual in that demand often exceeds supply. That tempts owners into treating the website as optional. It is the opposite. When you are full, the website's job changes from selling to capturing, and capture is where the money is, because the parent who joins your list in March is your September income.

The failure here is quiet. A parent finds you, sees no openings, and leaves without telling you they existed. You never learn how much demand you turned away, so you never plan capacity around it.

1. Say the position plainly

   Write whether you have space, for which age bands, and when you expect the next openings. A page that says infant room full, toddler openings in August, is more useful than a form that promises somebody will be in touch.

2. Make joining the list a form, not a call

   Ask for the child's date of birth, the care start date the family needs, the days they want and one contact method. That is enough to sort the list. Anything more and people abandon it at nine at night, which is when they are filling it in.

3. Make sure the enquiry lands somewhere

   The most common broken thing on a daycare website is a form that quietly stops sending. Send a copy to a second address, and test it yourself once a month. An enquiry form at your own domain, on business email you control, is far more reliable than one forwarding to a free personal address that may filter it as spam.

4. Reply the same day, even to say nothing has changed

   The centre that answers first usually wins the place. A short reply that confirms the position and gives a rough timeline holds a family for months.

5. Keep the list warm

   A note every couple of months to everyone waiting costs you nothing and prevents the awkward call where a family has already gone elsewhere and you have a gap.

Because the form collects a child's name, date of birth and a parent's contact details, the site needs an SSL certificate so that submission is encrypted in transit. That is standard on any current hosting plan and there is no reason to be without it.

When web hosting for daycare centers is one page and nothing more

If you are a registered home childminder caring for a handful of children, you very probably need a single page and nothing more.

Your name, your registration, the ages you take, roughly where you are, your hours and one way to contact you. That page can sit on the smallest plan available and it will do the entire job, because your enrolment is filled by word of mouth and a local parents group, not by search. Money spent on a multi-page site with a blog and a gallery is money you will not get back.

• You do not need a content management system for a page you will edit twice a year.
• You do not need a gallery. See the previous section about photographs, and note that the risk does not shrink because you are small.
• You do not need extra storage. A childminder page is measured in kilobytes.
• You do need the address to be approximate rather than exact if you work from your own home. Give the street or neighbourhood and share the number when you speak to somebody.
• You do need a working email address that is not the one you share with your family.

Spending more starts to make sense at a different scale. Several sites under one brand, a genuine enrolment funnel with a form and a waiting list you manage, staff pages you update as people join and leave, or a site carrying tuition information that changes each year. Those are real reasons to have something bigger. Number of children in the building is not one on its own.

One thing worth paying for at any size: knowing that the site can be put back. If your only copy of the site is the live one and it breaks, you are rebuilding from memory. Website backups are the cheapest insurance on this list.