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Case study on visual/web design,
hard-coded front-end development
and SEO optimization

Case study brief

Tugboats Preschool opened its doors in September 2019 and needed a website to help locals find the nursery.
  •  The client wished to have a site that had a playful and child-friendly look.
  •  I was supplied with a logo, minimal content and images of children engaged in play at the nursery.
  •  The client hoped the site could appear on the first page of google results.

Solutions used

Hosting arrangement

Visual design

Website design

Hard-coded mobile website development

Hard-coded desktop website development

Search engine optimization

View the site

Project details

Visual and web design

The client was looking for an affordable hosting solution with good customer service. I recommended her Krystal Hosting, which she was happy with, and arranged domain transfer and site migration for her.
She wished to have a sea-like header for her Tugboats logo, and I used Adobe Illustrator to draw sea waves that served as a background for her site’s header.

The site's header with waves

I also drew flowery playing fields for the front page and more waves for the footer.

drawing of flowery fields that serves as a background for a part of the front page

The curriculum and planning section received bright colours, matching the corresponding areas of the curriculum, and a layout that makes understanding the basics of EYFS easier.


I used CSS-grid to create the images gallery and that guaranteed fluid images' rearrangement on all screen sizes.


Screenshot of the site's images gallery
Screenshot of the Curriculum and planning page of Tugboats site

Search engine optimization

To optimize the site for search engines I manually created an XML map for the site and adjusted robots.txt file. I also filled all the titles and meta descriptions tags of every page of the site with the key words that would help the site to show on top of Google search results. Despite the fact that the client did not manage to register the site on Google Business at the time of site publication, I still succeeded in getting it to show on the first page of Google search results when parents googled for a nursery in Mortlake.


Google search results first page showing Tugboats Preschool

Speed performance

Good speed performance is important for SEO ranking and that is partly why I hard-coded the site without application of frameworks. As a result, the site received the highest speed rating on GTmetrix.

GTMetrix speed report with speed rating A