Create kindergarten website yourself: Here's how!

The topic of kindergarten is highly relevant for many parents: Kindergarten places are very limited and therefore in demand!

Therefore, it is often associated with great effort to find a kindergarten place for the offspring. Often, this happens through recommendations and contacts to other parents. Parents exchange information about which kindergarten they have had good experiences with, where there might still be free places, and so on. Nevertheless, kindergartens must not rest on their laurels: having their own kindergarten homepage is essential in the digital age!

Many parents also find out online whether and where kindergarten places are still available. But the website is also perfect for many other purposes than just looking for a place. In the following article, you can find out what these things are, as well as other tips on the homepage and the advantages it brings.

Since the imprint is of special importance on every website, it should be edited first. Every company, even daycare centers, need it on their website. If it is incorrect or even missing, site operators run the risk of receiving a warning. I have summarized what is important for a good imprint. But be careful: The list does not claim to be complete!

Checklist: Important key points of a meaningful imprint

• First and last name of the site operator

• The legal form of the company

• Register entry and VAT ID, if available

• Possibly profession-specific information

After you have created the imprint for your Kita homepage, I would directly start with the contact data on your website. In my eyes, these are just as important as the imprint, because the best Kita homepage is of no use to you if you cannot be reached by your users!

INFO: As a site operator, it is advisable to offer users as many communication channels as possible!

In any case, it is important that you offer your customers several contact options to make it especially easy for them to get in touch. On the one hand, this increases the chance that you will be able to provide parents with one of your daycare places or be available for help; on the other hand, it also increases the satisfaction of parents who want to contact you. Just think back: maybe you've already wanted to buy something or use a service and didn't reach the seller. In that case, you know how annoying something like that can be, especially when it's urgent, as is often the case with daycare spots.

Checklist: Communication channels you should offer visitors to your daycare home page

• An available phone number

• An accessible e-mail address

• Fax number, if applicable

• Social media channels, if applicable

How you can make it especially easy for site users to contact you, you will also learn further down in the text!

Now it's time to add the daycare center's opening hours to your website. It would be a good idea to display the opening hours directly in a box at the bottom of the page. On the one hand, this is often the first place people search for opening hours, on the other hand, this box is then available on all subpages of your daycare's homepage, not only on the homepage. In the following video you will learn how you can easily integrate your opening hours in a box.

In order for parents to get a better picture of your daycare center and what their child can expect, you should provide as much detailed information as possible on the daycare center homepage. This includes the typical daily routine of your facility. Through fixed rituals, children become accustomed to a daily routine at an early age and thus experience support and security. If you record these rituals on your website, parents can also get a good picture of how their child spends the day with you.

Checklist: Elements of a daily routine that could be recorded on your daycare website

• Typical arrival time of the children

• Common activities such as morning circle

• Meal times (breakfast and lunch)

• Nap time

• Free play

The equipment of the kindergarten / daycare center can also play a role for some parents in choosing the right facility. Again, if in doubt, note as much as possible on the Kita homepage. In this way, parents are presented with comprehensive information directly, without having to ask for details that may be important to them.

Checklist: Equipment of the Kita, which (if available) should be noted on the homepage

• Outdoor area with slide, swing, climbing frame, sandbox and toys

• Gymnasium with gymnastics equipment

• Number of rooms and groups in the daycare center

• Computer for the children

• Sleeping room with accessories

• Musical instruments

• Other special toys

If the daycare center has special equipment that may make it unique compared to other facilities, it is definitely worth noting this on the daycare center homepage!

As great as your daycare center may be with its special equipment and an attractive daily routine for child and parents, it also depends on the amount of the fees. It's best to set up an extra subpage for the fees that are due at your facility. It is also a good idea to list all cost items, as this provides more transparency and traceability. If there are other regular costs, for example for meals in the facility or for excursions, these should of course also be noted!

Once you have convinced parents about your daycare center, they can register their child with you. To make this as easy and hassle-free as possible, you can offer interested parties the opportunity to register on your website. You'll learn more about how to make this particularly easy later.

TIP: If you automate the process of registration, you save a lot of effort, unnecessary follow-up, etc.

Automating the registration process, e.g. through forms, has the advantage that you receive all the information from the parents and their children in one place. This saves you a lot of time, since you don't have to ask for and find out everything separately. I'll tell you later how you can integrate this process into your website.

You can also add nice memories, for example, of outings with your daycare group to the website. This way, parents get a better impression of activities in your facility than just through texts. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words!

INFO: If there are people recognizable on the pictures you want to upload to the Kita homepage, you have to ask for their permission before uploading!

Also pictures of your facility and its equipment are recommended for the Kita homepage: So you get a good picture at a glance whether the facility is suitable for your child or not. You should make sure that the rooms are well lit, not overexposed and kept clean. Photos of the outdoor area and the daycare building are also useful additions to the page!

To give your page a face, you should also put the educators in your institution on your page. If necessary, you can also include contact information for each person. A friendly photo of each person rounds off the friendly online presence.

TIP: Better no photos than bad photos! So make an effort and pay attention to things like lighting, a sympathetic smile or uniformity of the pictures.

Last but not least, you should also advertise vacancies and training positions on your Kita homepage. Nowadays, the vast majority of jobs are searched for and found online. By having your own homepage, you can reach a lot more people, and maybe even better ones!

It is therefore a good idea to create an extra subpage for vacancies: You can only profit!

Right at the beginning of the homepage creation, there is already a very difficult question: The choice of the domain name. This is so difficult because the domain name can no longer change. Therefore, it requires careful consideration what name to give to the new Internet presence now.

TIP: For most kindergartens and daycare centers a domain name according to one of the following two schemes is suitable: daycare-[name].com or [name]-kindergarten.com

INFO: For an even more professional Internet presence, we recommend a .de domain of your own. This gives the Kita homepage even more respectability!

When the website is created, you should also take care of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Through SEO you ensure that your site is listed relatively high in Google searches (for example, for nearby daycare centers). You achieve this, for example, by including relevant keywords that people might google for (e.g. Kita [city]) in your texts. By linking to your site you can further improve your position in the search engines.

INFO: If you are interested in SEO, you can learn more about the topic in this section.

The use of Google My Business might be even more relevant for Kitas: Creating a My Business account, for example, is a prerequisite for being shown as a business on Google Maps. When simply Googling for "daycare center", for example, the first thing that is displayed is a map of all daycare centers in the vicinity. If you manage to secure a place there directly, you will be shown to users first and also clicked on the most! In addition, advertising can also be booked on Google via a My Business account, if desired.

When writing content for your site or uploading images, you should always ask yourself if it's important and relevant on your site. But don't get me wrong: as mentioned above, it's important that you provide a lot of information on your page so that parents are fully informed and ideally no questions are left unanswered.

However, you should leave aside a lot of empty phrases, pictures without any statement or outdated content. Otherwise, browsing for relevant content on your daycare page is more like looking for a needle in a haystack. Therefore, leave out the unimportant and irrelevant and structure your page well!

When creating the page, think about how you can structure your content as intuitively as possible. Put yourself in the position of a person who has never visited your site and needs a certain piece of information: Where would they look for it first? Under which menu item could they expect to find which information?

TIP: It is a good idea to create a small mind map with all sub-pages and their contents before creating the page. This way you keep a good overview of the page structure!

If the desired content is difficult or impossible to find, then the search for it requires a lot of effort for the visitors of your Kita homepage. Therefore, try to make sure that all content can be found intuitively where every parent would expect to find it.

A great advantage of the homepage for daycare centers is that it functions as an inexpensive means of communication. Kitas can make important news for parents available on their site and thus reach the relevant target group cheaply and quickly. Let's say a field trip is coming up and caregivers want to inform parents about the cost, schedule, and other related items. The old-fashioned way would probably have been to post a notice in the kindergarten and caregivers would have informed parents individually. Nowadays, however, a website makes it possible to store all the important info online so that anyone can access it conveniently at any time.

TIP: The homepage construction kit offers the extra "News", with which info can be added to the page at any time or removed again if necessary.

For daycare centers, a website offers the advantage of constant accessibility: If parents have a concern, they can usually contact the center's caregivers at any time during daycare hours. With a website, however, they can contact you at any time. By storing additional contact options such as an e-mail address, for example, an e-mail can be written even late at night if a question or concern arises. This can then be answered conveniently the next day. Thus, the daycare center is virtually available around the clock!

A homepage offers another advantage over a flyer or verbal contact: It offers you space for a lot of extensive information! You can put everything here that could potentially be interesting for parents. Social networks, for example, have the disadvantage that postings are very time-related and quickly become outdated, especially when new posts are made. On a website, on the other hand, information can be delivered in a fully comprehensive and less time-related manner. With verbal contact, information must be communicated separately to each prospect, which is very time-consuming and inefficient. However, if info is captured on the website and referenced as needed, you type it all up just once during creation and can sit back from then on: Apart from updating your page, you don't have to do anything else.

As already mentioned in the introduction, the Internet is now the first port of call for everything from buying kitchen appliances and looking for hotels to finding the right daycare for your offspring. If your daycare center has so far been able to raise its profile mainly through recommendations and conversations among parents, a new homepage opens up many new opportunities for it. Parents who only search for daycare centers on the Internet will suddenly become aware of you. Thus you can reach clearly more members of the target group relevant for you! If you then connect the homepage with the Google My Business account mentioned above, for example, the chances of increasing your awareness will grow even more!

As announced, we will now talk about how you can make contacting us especially easy. Simply activate the extra "Contact form" of the homepage builder. You still have the option to insert a text in front of the form as well as a confirmation text (e.g. "Thank you for your message!"). Visitors to your site can now easily fill out the form on your site. This is much more convenient for users than having to write an extra mail. You will receive all messages sent via the contact form in your mailbox. This is how convenient online contact can be!

The homepage construction kit offers educators and daycare centers their own design template: With the template "Educator", we provide you with a page design specially tailored to kindergartens and daycare centers! Of course, you can still design the page freely and customize it according to your wishes, if you want to. However, if you don't want to completely redesign the page, you can use the educator template without having to do a lot of extra work afterwards.

INFO: You can choose the template for your page when you create it. Just choose the template "Educator" from the list of categories in the category "Social professions".

In order to make registration at the daycare center as efficient as possible, as already announced above, you can integrate the registration form as a PDF on your daycare center homepage. Parents can then either fill it out directly on their PC or print it out and send it to you or hand it in to you. Again, this saves you a lot of unnecessary effort and makes the registration process much easier! You can find out exactly how this is possible in this article.

This article should have given you everything you need to create a website for your daycare center. To do this, I first looked at its components. These included, for example, the daycare center's hours of care, the amount of the fee, the team of educators, and vacant positions.

Afterwards, you learned something about which marketing tricks you should consider to increase the likelihood of success of your page. Among other things, I went into detail about having your own Google My Business account, having a catchy domain name, and managing your page content well.

After that, I talked about the advantages that a kitasite will bring you. Thereby I mentioned the permanent availability, the possibility to provide extensive information as well as reaching new target groups.

Lastly, I recommended some extras for the website of your kindergarten, including the use of the educator template or the integration of the registration form as a PDF.

I hope that now all questions about the kindergarten website are answered and you feel like trying it out for yourself. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us!