Project Description
Happy Hearts Nursery in Kensington is a Montessori nursery and pre-school for children from 2-5, which offers a wide range of exciting and fun learning opportunities for young children in West London. They contacted us to help them set up their own web hosting, so that they could be in full control of their data protection responsibilities and didn’t have to worry about sharing a hosting platform with other businesses.
Website Rescue
Happy Hearts had a very well designed website already, and a clear, precise and thorough design philosophy. They needed two things from us. One was to move their website from their existing hosting (shared with other businesses) to a new hosting platform where they had sole control over access to both their WordPress Dashboard and the file system underpinning their installation. Picture Engine were able to do this over a bank holiday weekend, and at no point in the transfer process was the website offline, so any visitors would not have noticed. The second requirement was to work on the “on-page SEO”, and this was difficult using the existing WordPress theme, which wrapped text in a code wrapper that made it difficult for bots to read the full text. We therefore changed their WordPress theme to a new one whilst keeping the design of the site (which had been very precisely specified in both desktop and mobile versions) exactly the same; any WordPress developer will tell you that this is quite a demanding task and needed a lot of CSS work to get it just right, but we are confident that 99% of visitors wouldn’t see the difference even if they viewed the two versions side by side!
SEO
As with any nursery, the most important thing for Happy Hearts is to get the pupil numbers up and keep them up. Their website is an important tool for this, and the client was very keen to implement as many SEO improvements as we could suggest without changing the design philosophy of the site in any way. Using the new WordPress theme and the Yoast SEO plugin, we were able to identify areas of improvement in text, graphics and metadata on every page of the website. Again, a casual visitor would never notice the difference, but behind the scenes there has been a lot of work to optimise each page for SEO and improve the overall visitor experience metrics.
