A website has purpose, or at least it should. A website without purpose, will sit there and do nothing. A website needs purpose in order to accomplish anything. One mistake many people make when putting together a website for their daycare or preschool, is to ignore these purposes. They focus on looking good, or on showing off some credential, which are not un-important, but they're not purposes. Having people call you. That's a purpose. Having parents sign up their children; That's another purpose. It's what you want to do on the website.
Do you want to get new parents to sign up for a tour of the facility? That's a purpose. Do you want to get customer emails so you can send out a newsletter? That's a purpose.
Without a purpose there is no way to gauge how successfull your website is at doing what you want it to do, because you're not asking it to do anything.
To get people to do anything you have to present them with something called a 'Call to Action'. This can be as simple as a link saying contact oDaycare to get started or a graphic, a banner ad, a form, lots of things. They're ways to get people to DO something. They are a call to action. It's a way for the site to say "Do you want to do X? Here's how." One of the tricks of good website usability is in presenting effective calls to action. If people can't figure out what they want to do, or how to do it, they'll leave your site. If they want to come in to check out your daycare, but they see no way to contact someone for a tour, they might just leave, and you've lost a new customer signup. You've lost a sale.
Many basic cheap template sites will not tell you this, and certainly won't help you with figuring out what to do, and how to do it. oDaycare however will help you figure out what purposes you can use your website for, we already know a few, and we'll show you how to create your own calls to action, and to practice them yourself in order to have an effective and productive website. Our goal is to get a website to work for you, and presenting your users with effecitve Calls to Action is one very basic way to get that to happen, and it's one that oDaycare can help you with.
