Is your Web site serving you—and your club members—as it should? Clubs that take Web site marketing and maintenance seriously are reaping the rewards of their labor faster than they could ever have imagined. But for too many club and resort properties, sites that were created with a lot of excitement and sizzle several years ago now sit looking stale and immature. It’s still far too easy, in fact, to find club sites where information about an “upcoming event” that’s long since come and gone remains posted on the home page.While other parts of this site may frequently change, the impression made by this kind of mistake is that “nobody’s home”—and therefore there’s no reason to go inside.
The good news is, the universe of solid club and resort Web sites keeps expanding by the day, making it easier than ever to find helpful examples to learn from. In addition to reminders about basic dos and don’ts for site construction and operation, the following pages present some valuable lessons to be learned—both visually and through the words of those who put them together and now keep them looking fresh—from some of the best club sites now to be found in cyberspace.
As you’ll hear, many of these club managers started out feeling helpless and overwhelmed when faced with what can at first appear to be a daunting task. But by persevering and sticking to basic principles of sound Web site management, their club sites now offer the right combination of visual appeal, easy navigation, good search visibility, and special features for Web visitors. As such, they stand out as excellent marketing and communication tools for their organizations. How does yours compare?
From Horrific to Raves
Lynne Stewart, Sales and Marketing Director for Bristol Harbour Resort at Canandaigua Lake, Canandaigua, N.Y., was no different from most club managers when she first sat down to revisit what needed to be done with her property’s site. “When we first started looking at redoing our site, it was horrific,” she recalls.“I had no experience with Web sites, but I researched for weeks, trying to learn everything important so we could create a good customer experience with ours. At first, it was hard convincing others to spend the money needed to rebuild it, but within nine months it’s paid for itself, and it continues to pay off substantially.”
Bristol Harbour’s Web site hits grew by hundreds, then thousands, each month after its redesign, and are still growing. “We’ve received numerous [online] reservations for weddings, golf packages, groups and more,” Stewart reports. “Customers rave about the site now, and love being able to use the calendar to keep up with all of the events and specials.”
Marcia Borghesani, Web Site Administrator for Black Rock Country Club, Hingham, Mass., reports that her club’s Web site has grown to be so effective, it is now used for 100% of the club’s marketing efforts—which leads to significant savings by eliminating print mailings. Black Rock uses the services of a Web communications company that handles the intricacies of site design and coding, and lets Borghesani focus on updating and expanding content. “It’s so easy [to add and change information] and people love using the site; we’re really pleased with it,” she says. “It’s changed the scope of how we do business.”
Even when outside services are used, however, (and there are several that specialize in building and maintaining club and resort sites), the Black Rock example points out the critical need for a “point person” on the club staff who’s primarily responsible for keeping content fresh and lively. And this shouldn’t be a duty that’s added to the pile of an already busy person. Many clubs and resorts, in fact, have found that creating, and hiring for, new positions that are solely responsible for Web site marketing and upkeep will deliver quick and significant returns, through a steady flow of new membership and business inquiries.
Getting Attention in a Flash
In more and more cases, clubs and resorts see the potential returns from Web-generated business as great enough to justify going beyond giving Web duties to an administrative or marketing type, and actually hiring a full-time “Webmaster” who can handle all of the design and technical aspects as well. Short of that, many clubs are at least starting out by enlisting the services of qualified Web designers who can then work with an administrator on a transition that brings ongoing Web upkeep duties in house.
Such was the case at Marsh Creek Country Club in St. Augustine, Fla., where Scott Jehl was hired to design the site. Jehl’s insights about his goals when creating www.marshcreek.com provide lessons from one who now makes his living creating sites that best suit an organization’s objectives and the needs of likely visitors.
“The purpose of Marsh Creek’s new design was to attract new members and provide a useful site to current members,” Jehl reports. “I used Flash [an animation package] because of the visual advantages it could provide to make the site eye-catching and draw in new visitors.”
Visitors to the Marsh Creek site are greeted by an animated silhouette of a golfer hitting a drive, followed quickly by rolling script text and a “camcorder” effect that “pans” to a still shot of one of the club’s signature holes. The entire animated sequence takes only a few seconds. “I purposely kept the animation quick and the file size low,” Jehl says, “so that returning users and those with slow connections wouldn’t be turned off if the site took forever to load and navigate.”
Jehl also decided to “build the site to be usable on smaller screens”—a critical consideration that’s often overlooked in site design. Especially for club and resort sites that may now often be viewed by consumers using laptops and the newer flat-screen monitors, setting sites for smaller screen resolutions can help minimize the annoyances that come with only being able to view, or print, partial pages.
It’s easy to test how Web pages will be viewed at various common screen resolutions, just by going into a computer’s control panel and running them through the available display settings. Because of the much greater prevalance of laptops and flat screens, the days are long gone when the bottom levels of available resolutions (800×600 and lower) should be seen as the standard; many designers, in fact, are now using the higher configurations— including “stretched” versions—as their targets.
Another effective design technique employed on the Marsh Creek site is to “hold and repeat” certain content elements—in its case, the Upcoming Events column—so they stay in the same place as visitors click through to new pages. Too often, Web designers follow the mistaken belief that each page has to be entirely new and different. But on the Marsh Creek site, “[Upcoming Events] is located on most of the site’s pages, because of its importance,” Jehl says.
No One's An Idiot
Using the services of Web designers and Webmasters does have its price. So many clubs and resorts have found that after a site is initially created, it is more cost-effective to have the expert create a content management system (CMS) and then train someone on the club staff to use it.
These customized software programs are designed to be “user-friendly” enough (some might say “idiot proof”) to allow non-technical personnel to
update site content without sacrificing the elegance and professionalism of the original design. CMS’s are usually built around easy to follow frames and buttons that let a staffer drop in text for new content, style it, get a preview of how it will look on the page, and then “post” it and make it go “live,” at the same time that older content can be “taken down” or “archived.”
Most Web designers will be happy to include construction and transfer of a CMS as part of an original site design project; they know that you won’t want them to be the only ones who have control over the content on your site, and they don’t really want that job either—it’s not the business they’re in. But when the process includes transitioning through a CMS, the site can be kept fresh, new pages will blend seamlessly with old, and the original design will remain intact. Best of all, ongoing upkeep costs will drop dramatically.
“I can update our site myself, with the help of premade templates,” says Bristol Harbour’s Stewart. “It helps me keep things new and interesting for our repeat visitors.”
Staying Content With Content
As Stewart indicates, once you’ve figured out how a site will look initially and how it can be updated cost-effectively, an equally big consideration is to keep it compelling—not only for surfers who come across it for the first time, but also to keep repeat visitors coming back for new rides.
Another common mistake in Web site development is to shoot every bullet in the first round. Initial design should focus on providing basic information about a club or resort (location and directions, product offerings, contacts). But some of the best stuff should be saved for later, too.
A good way to keep coming up with effective new content, without overloading anyone or burning out their inspirational bulbs, is to share the workload on a rotating basis among key departments. For one site update, the executive chef can share menus and recipes; for the next, the golf instructor can offer a tip or interesting “fun fact.” Resort managers can have regular “bulletins” to promote upcoming events, and even the Webmaster or designer can be called in once in a while to provide written “tours” on using the site and finding all the helpful things it contains.
In all cases, don’t forget to include photos, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, to add personality and the all-important interface. And if you launched your site, like Marsh Creek, with animation and other navigational effects, don’t stand still in this regard as you update it, either; keep adding new photos, colors,music, etc. Don’t forget, when people come to a club or resort Web site, they’re usually doing so to find information that will help them plan a good time. So make sure each visit to your site provides some fun, too.
Each update of content should also trigger a “blast” of e-mails inviting members and frequent visitors to check out what’s new (and your initial site design should include ways to capture new email addresses, to augment the lists that you build up through other means). “Our front desk always knows when we do an update and [a concurrent] e-mail ‘marketing blast,’ because our customers respond to the [promoted] specials so quickly,” reports Bristol Harbour’s Stewart.
When They Search, They Will Find
Beyond keeping members informed who are already familiar with the appeals of your property, Web sites are also by far the most efficient way to draw in “passers by”—but only if you take the steps needed to help them find not only your street, but actual door. The first key step in this regard is to plaster “signs” about your site everywhere you possibly can. You went to the trouble of securing your URL (domain name and address) and then building on it, so why wouldn’t you now want to let everyone know where you reside?
“We place our Web address on absolutely everything we print,” says Karen Chase of The Powder Horn Ranch and Golf Club, Sheridan,Wyo. “We also belong to a private community directory site, for lead generation.” As Chase indicates, linking your site to online directories specific to your niche can help build traffic, as can site listings through Chamber of Commerce organizations.
Another big key to site visibility is search engine optimization—the constant scramble to have your club and site hang onto the top rungs of the long ladders of listings created by “key word” searches in Google, Yahoo, and other programs. Getting and staying on the top of the lists has become such an obsession with Webmasters that the “rights” to keyword descriptions (such as “Florida golf school”) are now auctioned off on a daily basis.
Club managers would be wise to monitor these auctions and adjust their own sites accordingly, by creating and imbedding less-used “meta descriptions” and “meta-keywords” in their pages (the search engines rely on these for assembling their rankings). But if you have neither the time nor budget to participate in bidding wars, you should still have someone check on a regular basis to make sure your site is as “search-friendly” as possible.
In general, this is achieved by keeping a site “clean” (less busy). You can also visit sites like the Search Engine Spider Simulator (www. se-spider.com) to see how much text content the search engine “spiders” are finding. If the simulator can’t identify anything for your site beyond a lot of HTML (programming) code, you may need to huddle with your designer and/or technical advisors, to make sure your site speaks as well “internally” as it does to everyone who arrives at your home page. C&RB
Summing It Up
• The best club sites strive to offer the right combination of visual appeal, easy navigation, good search visibility and special features, including a steady stream of new, compelling content.
• Effective creation and management of a site requires a “dream team” of designers, technical geeks and a “point person” from the club staff who must be the primary driver of content.
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