Happy Days - EDGE Creative

Summary
The Results

The Task

Team Members Involved on this Project

Laura

Karen

Ryan

Jon

Oliver

Summary

Happy Days operate a large group of nurseries in southwest England and the south of Wales, opening their first branch in 1991 and now controlling more than 20 sites across the region.

They care for around 2,000 children every single day and employ nearly 500 dedicated workers who provide a carefully curated and tailored experience for young learners.

Their approach is to use a specially crafted syllabus to prepare early years children for school in the most effective way possible, encouraging the development of key skills along the way.

The Task

Happy Days wanted to revamp their online presence, which included asking us to build a new bespoke website from the ground up with a focus on two key areas – the user experience and visual appeal.

We enhanced their graphic design and marketing materials while also auditing the current user journey on the website. The overall aim was to make their new website more visually appealing without losing their existing brand, which they loved, as well as making it simpler to navigate so that parents could easily find the information they needed.

They selected our marketing agency due to our experience in working with large national and international nurseries to deliver bespoke websites tailored to the educational sector.

Additionally, Happy Days wanted to change their SEO approach to make them more visible to a wider audience. They were already ranking on the first page successfully in the areas of the country they wanted to target, which meant we could focus our time on optimising the existing content rather than replacing it. This process involved adding regular blogs and fresh content to the website and fed heavily into the overall design process of their new website.

The Results

As the Happy Days team already like their established brand, our initial focus was to uplift and enhance their current branding rather than redesigning it. We created clear brand guidelines to ensure that all marketing collateral, including their new website, remains consistent.

Our team then organised a three-day on-site photoshoot with Happy Days at several of their nurseries. This allowed us to take staff headshots and promotional images of the children, team, and venue to be used across the website and social media graphics. We also collected video footage of interviews, nursery locations, and much more. These materials were then used as the basis for their marketing, providing that real-life visual element the client was looking for to showcase to parents their approach to teaching and share insight into a child’s day at Happy Days.

We conducted a large amount of research and performed an audit of the existing Happy Days website alongside those of their competitors. Our work involved investigating the performance of these websites in terms of search rankings in the geographical areas Happy Days were looking to target.

We also helped to set up their Google Analytics accounts to ensure that they can accurately measure and track their goals and conversions. Afterwards, we provided Happy Days with additional training so that their team could analyse Google Analytics 4 on their own and understand what the data means from a marketing perspective. We suggested SEO and website improvements based on these findings, including the addition of new pages, providing tools to help the user experience, and the development of a clear blog strategy.

Using these suggestions and the existing copy from the previous website as focal points, we built up a brand-new, bespoke website. This included custom layouts and design work, alongside the ground-up development of new tools and pages that would help site performance. We also added a search functionality where parents could find the Happy Day’s nurseries in their local area and be taken to a dedicated page for that location.

Finally, since Happy Days were already ranking well for search results in their targeted areas, it was key that we carried over as much relevant content as possible to the new website. Our writers then optimised this copy for SEO purposes, writing brand new pages in the same style and voice as existing ones.