Most golf club websites are not bad. They are simply built around what the club wants to say rather than what a visitor arrived to find out, and the gap between those two is where enquiries are lost.
This is a page-by-page checklist. It assumes you are either rebuilding or auditing what you have, and it is ordered the way a visitor moves rather than the way a navigation bar usually is.
The three questions everyone arrives with
Before the page list, the thing worth holding every page against. Almost every visitor to a club website is asking one of three questions:
- Can I play here, and how? Public, private, reciprocal, guest of a member.
- What is it actually like? The course, the ground, the atmosphere.
- What does it cost, and how do I start?
A site that answers those three quickly beats a prettier site that does not. Most club sites answer the first slowly, the second with a gallery of the clubhouse, and the third not at all.
The six pages
1. The club
What kind of place this is, in the first screen. Public or private, the year it opened, who designed the course if that is a name worth knowing.
The common failure is opening with the club's history. History is good material and it belongs further down; a visitor who does not yet know whether they can play here will not reach 1924.
2. The course
The page that decides it, and the one with its own checklist. At minimum, every hole shown rather than listed, with navigation a golfer can use spatially. The tour page checklist covers this page on its own.
3. Dining
Underrated, because it is often the reason somebody who does not play golf is on your website. Hours, whether the public can book, whether there is a dress code, and one honest picture of the room with people in it.
4. Outings and events
The highest-value page on most club sites and usually the thinnest. An organiser needs:
- Capacity, and the formats you run
- What is included, stated as a list rather than as a paragraph
- Who to contact, by name, with a direct line
- Something they can forward to the people they are deciding with
That last one is the one almost nobody provides, and it is why a course tour earns its place on this page as much as on the course page.
5. Rates and membership
The page people look for and the page clubs most often hide. If you publish rates, publish them here plainly. If you do not publish rates, say what the next step is rather than leaving a page that reads as evasive.
For membership: the categories, what each includes, and what happens next. A membership page that ends with a form and no indication of cost or process asks a lot of trust from somebody who has not met you.
6. How to visit
Address, a map link, parking, what to wear, where to check in, and what time to arrive before a tee time. Short, practical, and the page a first-time visitor opens in the car.
The things that sit on every page
Four, and each one is a common miss:
- A booking or enquiry button in the header, visible without scrolling, on
every page, saying what it does
- A phone number that is a link on a phone, so tapping it dials
- Your course, not stock imagery. A golfer can tell immediately, and one
real picture of your fifteenth is worth every licensed image of somebody else's
- The site working on a phone held one-handed, because that is the majority
of your traffic and has been for years
What to cut
Shorter list than the add list, which is usually the wrong way round in practice:
- Carousels on the home page. People do not wait for slide three.
- PDF newsletters as the only news.
- A members-only login as the most prominent button on a public page.
- Any page that has not been updated in two years. Delete it or update it; a
stale page is a signal about the whole club.
How to tell if it is working
Three checks a person at the club can run without any analytics at all:
- Give the home page to somebody who has never been, and ask them whether they
could play here next Saturday. Time how long it takes them to find out.
- Open the outings page and ask whether you would forward it to a committee.
- Open the course page on a phone and see whether you learn how a hole plays.
If all three pass, the site is doing its job. Most club sites fail the second and third, which is where the work usually is.