Daycare Searching Made Easy with DayCareCrossing.com

Posted by Ken

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ENTER_ALT So it’s the end of the school year and parents may be looking for a place to watch their young ones. Or perhaps a change is in order and it’s time to find a new daycare provider for their child. With DayCareCrossing.com, that search just got a little easier.

The site is setup to enable you to select from a list of major cities — 80 of them, in fact. Clicking on one of them will take you to that city’s portal for DayCareCrossing. Every city’s portal starts with a fork in the road: parents can take the path allowing them to start their search; providers, on the other hand, can add their business to DayCareCrossing’s listing. The layout could make better use of the space, but at least the page loads fast.

I chose the path for the parent, which is comprised of four steps. I first had to enter my name, address, phone number, and email. I found this slightly irritating because it meant that I’m opening myself up to being contacted by someone. The site tells me before I even get to this point that my information will be sent only to those providers that match my search criteria. At least this is made known up front, but if I really want to find find daycare providers, I’m going to have to bite the bullet.

While at this point I quickly noticed that there’s no quick way to return to the main home page where I could select another city if I wanted to. It’s pretty standard to have “home” or the logo take the visitor back to the main page, but in their case the logo has no link and the “home” only takes you back to the main page of the city portal. Not a huge flaw and something that’s easily fixed.

The next three steps asked for things like how many children I’m looking to have childcare provided for, their age, date of birth, etc. Some of this information was not required, which made me feel a bit more comfortable.

After I completed my profile and entered my search criteria, I was given a message telling me that I should be expecting an email very shortly. Indeed, I got it rather quickly. The message was to contain the providers that matched my criteria, if any providers existed.

My search for the Denver area returned no results. To their credit, they did tell me that it’s possible this might happen and that they’re working to get other providers in that area. The email told me this:

Because our service is relatively new, there may not be enrolled providers within 5 miles of your search address
Your search address may be invalid
Your search address may be outside of the market you searched in

A feature I’d like to see would be to enable users to enter a radius from the address being searched. Five miles doesn’t seem to be sufficient. Or better yet, just allow me to enter a zip code and have the service search on that, then let me narrow it down by entering an radius or address.

Other hoped-for features would be to simply post the results on the web site instead of emailing them, and not sending my information to providers. I don’t see the point in this latter one, really. This is a big benefit to the providers, of course, but in this day and age I would rather see the power to decide to contact the other party to be put in the hands of the parent doing the searching.

[tags]daycare,provider,child,children,kids[/tags]

This has been a sponsored review.

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