Holly Tree Nursery, Billinge. Nr Wigan came to wncreative right at the start, the new owner Lorraine had heard about the work I had done with Safehands Network some years ago.  Safehands went from a back bedroom babysitting company to a multi-million pound organisation in little over 10 years, in part, I had a hand in it with branding, consultancy and marketing.

With this reputation, Lorraine understood that quite literally she was in safe hands.  From the start, Lorraine wanted a look and image that embraced everything she wanted Holly Tree Nursery to become, warm, professional and passionate about child care.  Lorraine simply said "I want this nursery to be somewhere children enjoy being and parents can relax in the knowledge that their children are being taken care of in the very best way"

Logo Design first - solid foundations

With this in mind, I got to work on the logo design, climbing into the memories of my time as the father of young children and what I would want to see as a parent.

The name Holly Tree was important as a starting point for obvious reasons but also because the Holly Tree is a symbol of peace and joy.  A popular toy with children has eternally been wooden building blocks, in addition, the combination of the Holly and Christmas, led me to think of stars which led on to the big sign in Hollywood, and so came the strapline "For all your little super stars"

The logo design embodies many of these thoughts, warmth, child-focused, building blocks, large sign, stars and of course the strapline

The combination of baby blue, in the background, coupled with hints of green and yellow pulled the whole log design together, the icon being the icing on the cake obviously representing a little person in building blocks.

The final logo was embraced by Lorraine totally, her nursery building and signs were promptly given the insignia along with staff uniforms etc etc.

As with many new start-ups funds were tight and time even more so, the website build had to be a simple but easy-to-use system that would provide a solid foundation for content to develop.  A simple website was to suffice for a number of years.

The total start-up package alongside a lot of work from Lorraine proved to be a successful combination - as the nursery is fully booked and expansion is on the horizon.

Growth brings a new website design

Bringing the story right up to the present day and with plans afoot, I was asked to bring the website right up to date.  So the website was evolved to embrace many new technologies and provide a showcase for the nursery proper.  The new website design fuses the spirit of Holly Tree today with a simple narrative, starting at the top with a peep out at a fantasy land of toys and nature, moving down to the main body of the site and content presented on a simple layered paper-style background.  Finally, the background of the website becomes more of a wall with notices pinned to it, ending at the foot with an array of toys sitting on a plush carpet.

All in all the website has an almost Disney feel to it, bright and vivid yet soft and warm at the same time.

On viewing the website Lorraine simply stated -"Wow, that's amazing and such good value for money, superb thank you so much"

All in all one happy customer once again.  I continue to work with Holly Tree providing website management facilities and organic SEO.

The technical features of the site are -

• Custom-built template design built on Wordpress
• 100% responsive from top to bottom.  This means the website resizes and reformats content automatically to the type of device.  Look at the website on a phone vertically you see one layout, turn the phone the website rescales to fit the aspect ratio.  In addition, it responds to tablets and resizes to fit any screen size.
• Full content management system.
• Responsive image scaling and image gallery
• Ready for ecommerce
• High-speed image compression from Yahoo
• Embraces HTML5 & CSS3 technology
• RSS feed system for viewers to subscribe to updates
• High speed – Independently tested faster than 54% of tested websites
• Unlimited pages
• Social Networking functions
• Google ready with web tools built-in
• Expandable and adaptable.
• Highly focused on user experience
• Frontpage responsive slider
• Integrated SEO tools for high visibility and search engine performance