10 Bunkers To Avoid In Golf Website Design
- Avoid design gimmicks and design overload
Avoid using lots of graphic devices in your golf website design. Certainly avoid music in the background - if it doesn't annoy the visitor in the first visit, it certainly will in the second. Never have more than one animated device on a page, as it is too distracting.
- Don't use lots of small images. Showcase the Golf Course
Small photos often won't do justice to the beauty of your golf course and should be avoided in golf website design. In order to showcase it, avail of the latest macro flash technology. Include slideshows on your website and ensure golfers immediately get to see the beauty of your course. Flash viewers are now ubiquitous with almost 90% of browsers containing the plug-in. Also, as part of the golf website design you could consider a movie brochure which is a very affordable way of bringing your course to life. Panning and zooming effects are applied to photos of your course and captions convey the key features of the course alongside media reviews. Set to music, this results in a powerful marketing tool on your website.
- Don't be in the dark
Ensure you have web-tracking software to tell you:
- How many visitors go to the site daily
- What town, region or country they are from
- How many get past the home page and what pages they tend to look at or rarely visit
This is vitally important data to help you refine your golf website and should be planned for when considering your golf website design. For example, if you discover that only 20% of visitors go beyond the homepage, that is a big issue. On the other hand, if you can see that very few users visit a key page on the site, this information provides the guidance you need to refine and optimise your site design.
- Ensure it is Fast Loading
Around 80% of web traffic comes from search engines - a fact which isn't always considered in golf website design. That means people land on your site and expect to find what they want quickly. Ensure the homepage loads within a maximum of seven seconds. If users have to wait for your page to load, they will bounce off the site and go to the next site that appeared on the search page results.
- Don't cram everything in. Less is more
A simple and uncluttered site with a single-minded message in each page makes for the best web experience. During the process of designing your golf website avoid trying to include too much information on a page. During the golf website design process Ask yourself, "What is the one thing I want the golfer to think and do" on this page?
- Don't complicate. Ensure you have a simple navigation
Navigation should be simple and intuitive. A child should be able to immediately understand how to find information on your page. A person should never be more than three clicks from what they want.
- Ensure you regularly compare
You should always keep an eye on what other golf courses that you benchmark yourself against are doing on their websites. Bookmark them and visit once a month. Golf website design is an interactive process and you may want to incorporate their new ideas into your site in the future.
- Don't make it difficult to buy
All too often, golf website design can overlook the potential for selling items form the pro shop online. If you are selling products on your site, ensure your users are never more than two clicks away from ordering the product.
- Avoid having a separate online brand
When golfers visit your golf course and your clubhouse, what impression do they have? In a few words, can you describe the personality of your brand? Ask yourself what is the tone of voice and what kind of experience would golfers expect on your website? Ensure your web designers understand how to translate your offline brand to your website. Ask them how they will go about it. As experts, they should know.
- Avoid the biggest bunker of all…
Finally, and most importantly, always design your golf website with traffic in mind. Many golf courses make the mistake of designing their website and then start thinking about driving traffic to it. The problem is that the way you design your site can result in your site being ignored by the search engine spiders, which means you will receive very little traffic. When designing your site, ensure you avoid the following pitfalls and ask your marketing agency to confirm that they have been avoided:
Avoid flash sites: Sites are designed in HTML or flash code. Search engine spiders sent to index your site cannot read flash.
No frames: Spiders cannot read what is inside a frame, so you won't be indexed and noticed by search engines.
No dynamic pages: Some sites are developed with a database, which generates dynamic pages. You can tell if there are dynamic pages on your site if there is a question mark within the page URL. Again. Not all search engines can read dynamic pages so it is best to avoid them.
Text within graphics: To ensure different browsers read text uniformly, design agencies often put text within a graphic. It looks great. However, a spider cannot read text that is added to graphics and simply moves on.
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