Website re-design for childcare company

Dear Priyadarshan,

Thank you very much for posting a review on my concept.

This homepage was a real challenge for our designers. We've been torn between two necessities:

1) to educate first-time visitors about about au pair childcare option 2) to attract those, who already familiar this au pair program, with appealing call to action

To do first, our company invested significant time, money and human resources to produce videos about families who benefited from au pair program. These videos target affinity groups, defined by our marketing team. On my opinion videos are much better then just testimonials. Since we think these videos are really important we gave them such a prominent space on a home page. This also has been reinforced with text on tabs in case visitor doesn't want to watch videos.

Speaking about second purpose of the page. We've decided that home page cannot be treated same way as landing page it's a different entity. On the landing page (and we have at least 3 dozens of those) content is really optimized around keyword or promotion, also there are no exits from the landing page except by filling out a lead form.

This is a home page and we've decided to concentrate on optimizing the content on educating user about au pair program. Only call to action we've decided to put on the page is a current promotion, which I agree is not prominent enough.

Sincerely, Marina

Thank you for reviewing this. 5) Yes, another family story will be highlighted on mouse over effect.

Dear Emma,

thank you for your extensive review. Historically (for last 20 years) we've been using Helvetica Neue font in our printed materials and logo. And I would really like to use only this font family on the page. But, as you probably know, Helvetica Neue is not a web-safe font so I insisted on substituting it with Arial as much as possible for the sake of SEO. Although there are image-replacement techniques I'm not very excited to use them, since they increase page loading time significantly (our home page is already pretty slow), there is no guarantee they will work every where, plus they are not very search-engine friendly.

I'll pass your recommendations to our designers, we'll see what they can do.

thank you again.

Helvetica neue is a lovely font but that main headline definitely needs some typographical work even if you don't change font - it really needs strengthening and making a bit tighter.

Keep it all ranged left if it is going to be in html type instead of an image as you won't be able to control it's spacing well enough otherwise. But really think design wise you'd be better off saving your main headline out as a picture - you have image behind it so just flatten the type onto this and make sure you make good use of 'alt' tags for the SEO. That way page load shouldn't be compromised or SEO

Hi Andy,

Thank you for your review. Logo has been omitted on purpose.

Au pairs are young people from abroad (19-26 years) who travel to USA to provide american families with up to 45 hours per week of personalized childcare, in exchange for the privilege of living in their home as a family member and getting an education in USA.

The splash image represents an au pair with children and bottom section represents random profiles of au pairs pre-screened by us in our overseas offices (criminal background and medical check, knowledge of English), that are waiting to matched with families.

Hi Szymon,

Thank you so much for reviewing my concept.

I agree that bottom looks pretty crowded, but I really like the idea of having site map in the footer, so user can easily see where he/she is. Do you have any examples on your mind of sitemaps in the footer that don't look crowded?

Thank you, Marina

Thank you