Case Study
Kingsthorpe Bowling Club
Introduction
Kingsthorpe Bowling Club has been around for many years. The club has both indoor and outdoor rinks that provide a great space for members to exercise and enjoy the sport of bowling. Despite the importance of having a well-designed and user-friendly website, the club’s previous website fell short in many ways. The website was created using a free platform called Wix without much consideration for the needs of site visitors. Unfortunately, the person who made the website is no longer part of the club and the website is not updated often. With a staggering 74 pages, numerous pages contained very little information, making it difficult for members to find what they were looking for. The menus were long and confusing, further frustrating visitors who wanted to access relevant information quickly. Furthermore, the website lacked important features such as a consistent design, readable font size, organization, and mobile optimization. As a result, visitors frequently left the site dissatisfied and underwhelmed, leaving a poor impression of the club.
Engagement
In previous collaboration, I have had the pleasure of working with one of the esteemed members on various other projects. Given our well-established professional relationship, he considered it to be the most logical and obvious decision to include me in the preliminary discussions for this project. As the club is run entirely by a management team composed of the members, it was critical to provide them with all of the relevant information necessary for them to make informed decisions regarding potential expenditures of the club’s financial resources. In response, I developed and submitted a comprehensive six-page Website Review document detailing the current website’s flaws and providing suggestions on how to address them moving forward. The report was incredibly detailed, providing sufficient information to convince the management team that the club website needed an overhaul, and they agreed to proceed with the redevelopment project.
Process
The club created a small project team from its members and over three months I worked closely with them to produce the new website.
My suggestions for new club branding were readily agreed and they now have new logos and stationery for a consistent “Brand” that matches the website. My preferred approach with this sort of project, where a number of parties have to agree with the site creation, is to produce a “development site” on my hosting that greatly speeds up the development process.
Instead of creating pages that have to be reviewed in meetings making the process, potentially, protracted. The developments can be reviewed independently by the “interested parties” and I have found that clients find it easier to say what they don’t like about any element rather than being able to describe what it is they actually want.
There was then the non-inconsiderable task of taking all the information from the existing site and transferring it to the development site and creating a clear site structure. Grouping information into a logical structure so that the information for members and visitors could be found easily.
Having a development site meant that the project team could review and comment on what they found invaluable and resulting in everyone feeling that they were part of the decision-making processes.
The final agreement was that the site and domain should be transferred to a new hosting platform that provides much faster servers.
Once the hosting account was created the development site was migrated to the new hosting platform and the domain was rerouted meaning that there was no loss of service to the client.
Since the site has gone live the members’ usage of it has greatly increased with requests for more pages and items to be added including some tournament management that in future years will be added to a proprietary game management package specifically designed for bowls club needs with links from the club site.