A Daycare Site With a Hit Counter and a Guestbook

The site

A group daycare in a converted house on a residential street, with two playrooms and a fenced yard. Its website was made around 2003 by a parent who was handy with computers.

The home page has a tiled background of crayons, a waving cartoon sun and bouncing alphabet blocks, with the welcome set in a comic font.

At the bottom a counter reads "You are visitor number 48,213." Beside it, a small badge says the site is best viewed in Netscape at 800 by 600 pixels.

A link invites parents to sign the guestbook. It holds several hundred entries, and the newest forty advertise pills, casinos and replica handbags.

The hours are in a newsletter from 2014, saved as a PDF. Fees, available spaces and how to apply are not on the site at all.

The inference a visitor makes

A parent looking for care is short of time: a return-to-work date, a list of six or seven daycares, and a lunch break to work through them on a phone.

What they need is quick: a space for my child's age, from when, at what cost, and hours that fit the commute.

This site answers none of it. What it does say, loudly, is that nobody has looked at it in a long time.

The spam matters most. A business asking to be trusted with small children has casino links under its name, and a careful parent reads that as a sign of how everything else is run.

Some parents assume the daycare has closed. Others phone during the day, pulling the director out of a room to answer what the site could have said.

What parents came for

• Spaces by age group, and when the next one opens.
• Hours, including the earliest drop-off and the latest pick-up.
• Fees, or a range, and what they cover.
• The ages taken, from youngest to oldest.
• Where it is, and where to stop for drop-off.
• How to visit or join the waiting list.

The first decides whether a parent calls at all. A family needing a toddler space in September will skip any daycare that does not say whether it has one.

The counter says the wrong thing

Hit counters date from the late 1990s, when a visible number was proof that a site existed and people came to it.

The number never meant much. It counts every page load, including the director's own visits and search engine robots, and says nothing about who visited or why.

Today it says one thing: how old the site is.

It also loads from somebody else's server. Free counter services change hands and close, leaving a broken image box or whatever the new owner chooses to show.

Analytics does the job properly: it counts real visits and shows which pages parents read, without showing anything to visitors.

The guestbook is an open door

Guestbooks were the comment sections of their day. Most ran on small scripts installed once and never updated.

Spam robots hunt for those scripts because they accept anything anyone types, links included. Once one finds the page it posts daily, and nobody at the daycare has looked in years.

To a parent, it looks like a site that has been taken over.

To Google, a page of pharmacy and casino links marks a neglected site. Search Console can report it as a manual action for user-generated spam.

The script itself is old code that writes whatever visitors type onto the server, which is exactly what attackers look for.

Buried under the spam are a few genuine notes from parents. They are the only part worth keeping.

Clip art and a badge from another decade

The sun and the blocks show nothing real: not the rooms, the yard, the nap area or the people who would look after a child.

The badge is worse than it looks. The page was built at a fixed width for screens nobody uses now, so on a phone parents must pinch and drag to read tiny text.

Most parents doing this research are on a phone. For them the site is not just dated; it is hard to use.

A worked example

The director kept the domain and the email address families had used for years, and replaced everything else with a small site of four pages.

The home page now opens with one line saying what the daycare is and where, then spaces by age group, dated with the month of the last update.

Hours, ages and fees come next, with what the fees include. The phone number sits at the top, ready to tap.

A button books a visit, and the waiting list form asks only for what the director needs to call back.

Photographs of the empty rooms and the yard were taken on a Sunday, so no child appears without permission.

The counter, guestbook, clip art and badge are gone. Three short notes from the old guestbook, used with the parents' agreement and first names only, sit near the bottom.

A date beside the spaces

Spaces change monthly, and a toddler space left on the page after it is filled causes the same wasted calls as no line at all.

Put the month beside the availability and make updating it one person's job on the first of each month. A visible date also shows that someone looks after the site, the opposite of what the counter said.

The counter-case within the site

A daycare with a long waiting list and no spaces for a year can reasonably keep its site small.

It still needs to say so: full until a given month, with a way to join the waiting list. That answers the most common call before anyone dials.

The long history deserves a place too. Two decades in the same house is a reason to trust the daycare, said in plain words rather than a visitor count.

Remove the relics, and put spaces, hours and fees where a parent on a phone sees them first.

What to change

1. Close the guestbook and delete its script.
2. Remove the counter and the browser badge.
3. Replace the clip art with real photographs.
4. Put spaces by age group at the top.
5. List hours, ages and fees in plain text.
6. Make the phone number tappable on phones.
7. Date the spaces line every month.

Step one cannot wait. The guestbook does damage every day, to how parents see the daycare and to how Google sees the site.

The same gap between what a site shows and what visitors need is the subject of a restaurant site whose hours are in a Facebook widget.

Frequently asked questions

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