Most golf course websites have a page called The Course. On most of them it is a list of eighteen rows with a par and a number off the card, and perhaps a picture of the clubhouse at dusk. A golfer deciding between you and the course twenty minutes up the road learns almost nothing from it.
A course tour fixes that page specifically. It shows every hole from the air, tee to green, with a map a golfer taps to pick one. This guide is about getting it onto the page you already have, which takes one line of code and about ten minutes of somebody's afternoon.
What you are actually adding
One embed. It behaves the way a video embed behaves: you paste a short snippet into the page, and the tour appears inside your layout, in your colours, sized to whatever column you put it in.
What it is not is a redirect. Your golfer stays on your website, on your domain, inside your navigation. Nothing sends them somewhere else and nothing asks them to download anything.
The tour also lives at its own address, which matters for two things covered later: a link you can text to someone, and a code on a tee marker that opens one hole on a phone standing on that tee.
Before you paste anything, decide where it goes
The honest answer for almost every club is the course page, above the hole list rather than below it. The list is reference material that a golfer reads after they have decided to come; the tour is what decides them.
Three placements worth considering, in the order they usually make sense:
- The course page, near the top. The default, and right for most clubs.
- The membership page. A prospective member is choosing where to spend a
season. Showing them the back nine is a stronger argument than a paragraph about the back nine.
- The outings or events page. An organiser is picturing their group on the
property and has never seen it. This is the page where that picture arrives.
You do not have to pick one. The same embed can sit on all three, and changing the tour later updates every copy at once, because they are all pointing at the same place.
What to send whoever runs your website
If somebody else maintains the site, this is the whole message. It is short on purpose, and it is the entire handoff.
Please add this embed to the course page, as near the top as the layout
allows, full width of the content column. It is a single block, it needs no
plugin and no account, and it should sit inside the normal page content rather
than in a header or a sidebar.
Attach the snippet to that message. A web person will know exactly what to do with it, and there is nothing to configure: no API key, no settings panel, no account for them to create.
If you maintain the site yourself
Every builder names the block slightly differently. Look for one of these:
- Squarespace: add a block, choose Code, paste, set it to display as HTML
- Wix: Add → Embed Code → Embed HTML, paste into the box
- WordPress: a Custom HTML block in the editor, not a paragraph block
- Duda, Weebly, GoDaddy: an Embed or HTML Code element
The one mistake worth naming: pasting into a text or paragraph block instead of an embed or HTML block. In that case the page shows the code itself rather than the tour. If you see a line of angle brackets where the holes should be, that is what happened, and moving the same paste into the right kind of block fixes it.
How to check it before you call it done
Open the page on a phone. Not a desktop browser made narrow, an actual phone, because that is where most of your golfers will see it and because a narrow desktop window does not reproduce how a phone handles an embedded frame.
Three things to look at, and they take a minute:
- The map appears and a hole opens when you tap it
- Nothing is cut off at the right edge, and the page does not scroll sideways
- The page above the tour still looks like your website
If the page scrolls sideways, the embed has been put inside a fixed-width container somewhere in your theme. That is a layout setting on your side, and whoever runs the site will recognise it immediately.
What changes after it is live
The hole list stays. The tour does not replace your scorecard information and it should not. It replaces the gap between a number on a card and an actual picture of the ground that number describes.
The link to the standalone tour is worth keeping somewhere obvious too. It is what you paste into an email to an outing organiser, and what a tee marker code points at when a golfer standing on the seventh wants to see the seventh.
If you want to see one running before you decide anything, the course tour page on this site has a live one embedded exactly the way yours would be, and the work page shows the same course in every shape it ships in.