Sunflower Lodge Childcare Website

Sunflower Lodge opened it's doors in Spalding in April 2010 having outgrown the owners’ previous child-minding setting. The nursery grew rapidly with a highly qualified and committed work force and now cares for children from babies to pre-school age. Sunflower also offers wraparound care for school age children with drop off and pick up options and an afterschool club.

Sunflower Lodge Childcare appointed PSP-IT to design and develop a new fully mobile responsive website to replace their existing website which was approaching 7 years old and no longer reflected their brand or range of services.

Requirements

Following a complete review with Sunflower Lodge the following requirements were identified for the new website:

  • New design and look and feel for their website
  • Responsive website – to be viewed on mobile devices
  • Content Management System (CMS) allowing staff to update the website without the need for complex programming skills
  • Contact us page for customer enquiries
  • Password Protected area and registration facility for sensitive content
  • Links to Social Media Channels

At all times PSP needed to be aware of the sensitivities of working with content relating to children. Content needed to be placed either in the public arena (if it was non-identifiable) or behind a failsafe registration and password protected area if it related to individuals.

Solution

For the first part of this development PSP produced a functional specification to outline all the development requirements and functionality that was to be included as part of this development. 

The functional specification covered the technical and development requirements to build a new mobile responsive website for Sunflower Lodge Childcare. 

Detailed within the specification are the tables, fields, pages, workflow and logic required within the website. 

The functional specification was handed over to Sunflower Lodge for review and sign off.  Once both parties had signed off the functional specification, PSP began the development of the new website based on the requirements detailing within the signed functional specification.

The new website was developed within the Umbraco CMS platform, including the development of fully responsive pages for a range of phone and tablet devices catering for users of Apple, Android and Windows-based operating systems. 

The open source CMS Umbraco, allows Sunflower Lodge to manage their own site content quickly and easily allowing administrators to create, update and delete pages on their website through the Umbraco CMS backend without having to submit and wait for requests to be actioned by any third parties. 

To upload and publish content we utilised the Users section in Umbraco. This allows the client to control who can add users, edit and publish pages.  

Beyond the development, in line with PSP’s commitment to quality and their ISO recognition, a range of comprehensive test plans and user guides were created to support user-training, implementation and to ensure maximum buy-in from all stakeholders.

Benefits

  • New, modern look and feel for the Sunflower Lodge Childcare website
  • Password protected area with registration gateway
  • Responsive design for use on smartphones and tablet devices
    Search Engine Optimisation - to help increase traffic to the website
  • Edited inhouse using Umbraco Content Management System

“The whole experience of working with PSP has been excellent. We were impressed with how much time they took getting to know our team and finding the true essence of what we wanted to achieve with our website. The staff at PSP have been so supportive from the concept to the new design through to showing us how to use it. We loved every minute of working with them and especially knowing they are just at the end of the phone for any questions we have. We have had great feedback and engagement from the parents with the new log-in area. We really are delighted with our website. ”

Lisa Oddie

Owner, Sunflower Lodge Childcare
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Where to find us

We'd love to welcome you into our office! We're only 20 miles north of Peterborough, conveniently just off the A16.

Carver House
Apex Court, Elsoms Way
Pinchbeck
Lincolnshire
PE11 3UL