Smarties Nursery is a high-quality day nursery based in Rastrick, West Yorkshire, offering outstanding childcare at an affordable cost. Smarties Nursery is a wholly owned subsidiary of Rastrick High School Academy Trust. Their experienced staff offer the highest quality nursery care, catering from birth through to school age. Rated by Ofsted as an ‘Outstanding Provider,’ Smarties Nursery aim to enable all children to grow and develop in a happy, stimulating, and safe environment.
“Staff support children’s emotional well-being exceptionally well. Babies and young children thrive and build extremely secure emotional attachments to their key persons.” Ofsted Report 2019
At Smarties Nursery, children have the option to experience exciting and engaging activities on a whole new level. Smarties incorporates modern day technology and traditional activities and play, aiding in child development and learning experiences. They offer an extensive range of opportunities for children to have fun and learn, with outstanding facilities in the nursery and in the school. The full Smarties Nursery team are Paediatric First Aid trained and have gained the endorsement of Millie’s Mark. Millie’s Mark is awarded as a special endorsement to childcare providers in England and Scotland that go way above and beyond minimum requirements by having 100% of staff trained in paediatric first aid.
Smarties Nursery were looking for website designers to work on a redesign for their website. They explained that their website is one of the main channels through which they receive enquiries about enrolment. They discussed how they weren’t happy with their current website and wanted to work with website designers to create a new website design that more closely reflected Smarties values and more effectively promoted the exceptional childcare they provide.
Smarties Nursery’s current website had a conservative, somewhat corporate design. They expressed that they thought the design did not accurately reflect the Smarties brand. They wanted their website to be more friendly, warm, and welcoming to visitors. Smarties’ marketing manager explained that they wanted a stylish and unique website design, with bespoke creative elements that would capture and communicate Smarties Nursery more effectively.
The website Smarties wanted would be an information-based website that features text, images, contact forms and a downloadable brochure. Their old website was very text-heavy and did not display any real images. The nursery wanted the new website to feature more bite-sized information, less text and to feature a lot more images and original graphics. The main goal for the website was to create an engaging digital space for visitors that provides information about the Nursery, their standards of care, and information about their facilities and fees.
We began by analysing the Smarties Nursery current website and identifying problem areas. We identified where we could enhance the Smarties visual identity across the site, and how to adapt the brand into a unique layout and design. Once we had completed our analysis, we reorganised the website content and created a new sitemap. We decided to restructure the main pages and sub pages to condense the content and create a more user-friendly site that would be simpler for visitors to navigate. We reduced the web pages from 19 down to 11.
We felt that the website design should aim to appeal to parents and suggested to the Nursery that the redesign should be focused on creating the right tone using images, colour, fonts, animations, and brand implementation. The website design should appeal to the parents of the children, and the message should highlight the high-quality services and outstanding care the nursery provides. We experimented with different ways to use Smarties Nursery brand colours. We experimented with elements of their logo to help identify additional brand assets that we could develop to enhance the brand throughout the site and create more engaging user experiences for the site visitors. Smarties’ marketing manager provided us with a suite of new images of the nursery, including images of the facilities and photos of the nursery children during play time.
We began our website design by focusing first on the homepage. We created a clean and modern layout using white and a light green as the main colour foundations. We used their brand colours throughout the site to emphasise text and page sections and to help navigation and strengthen the brand visually. The logo includes 4 illustrative circular icons. We employed these logo elements as a starting point to help inspire additional brand graphics and assets. We created original graphics using circles, lines, and patterns to develop the Smarties brand visually and enhance the overall style and aesthetic. We also added animation effects and scrolling effects, creating a more responsive and dynamic design and feel.
We delivered a draft design of the new Smarties home page to the marketing manager and requested his feedback and evaluation of the design. The feedback was extremely positive. Smarties said this was the kind of design he was hoping we would produce. We were then given the green light to continue working on the rest of the website and bring it to completion ready for launch.
We continued the design, creating new designs for each website page with new graphics, images, and unique layouts related to the content on the page. We developed the Smarties ‘Meet the Team’ page substantially, highlighting the highly experienced staff, their Millie’s Mark childcare providers special endorsement and the nursery’s Ofsted ‘Outstanding Provider’ status. We also designed and integrated a suite of branded icons to place as navigational aids throughout the website and further strengthen the visual brand identity across the site.
“We approached Grinning Graphics to redesign our Smarties Nursery website. We wanted a stylish and on-brand website that would reflect the quality and prestige of the nursery. We felt that our old design didn’t showcase the nursery’s best qualities. We are really happy with the new website and love how Grinning Graphics used our branding to create unique brand graphics and use them throughout the site to bring an overall stronger brand consistency and stylish website. The website now feels more aligned with our values and reflects the quality of our service.”
Jamie Jenkins - Marketing Manager
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