Every gym needs a web presence to help grow their business, but how big does their website really need to be to be truly effective? Gym owners all over know they need to invest in something that looks attractive, exciting, and professional, but on a limited budget with limited resources this can be difficult. To help everyone out lets examine what a gym really needs to help out their business.
What Makes a Good Gym Website?
The first thing is understanding your audience. When people start designing their website they can come up with this incredible list of things it should have. “We need a news section for all the latest updates. We need a picture section so all our athletes can upload pictures their moms take a competition. We need a videos section so that every parent can see their baby perform.” While all of these ideas seem great at first, in reality you need barely any of it. People will visit a gym website for only a few things: general gym/class/team information, paying their bill, finding the links to their social media websites. Past these three things everything else you add to a website will stop getting updated and end up being a drag on resources (and money in the beginning to design it). A parent is coming to your website ‘once’ to get information on what services you offer. A child will come to your website to look for your twitter or Facebook page (although this is questionable as most kids will just search in Facebook). Lastly your most frequent visitors will come to pay their bill (possibly the best reason to have a website is online bill pay). Scaling down the website to just these three things allows you to come up with someone simple, effective, and not to heavy on the financial resources.
Keep it Simple and Professional
Creating a gym website does not have to be incredibly difficult. As we said before its mostly a medium to put out general static information A cost effective plan is to use the software, WordPress, to help develop your website. There are millions of websites using WordPress to promote their business. WordPress is a free blogging software that has been adapted, with various plugins, to meet any business need. There are also free skins and many developers willing to help you (for a lower fee than developing a website from scratch) get your site looking how you want. As well many hosting companies will host a WordPress site for as little as 5 bucks a month.
Use Social Media
Because Facebook and Twitter are so easy to use, even from a mobile device, these platforms should be heavily utilized to promote the social aspect of your gym. Took a great picture at a competition? Tweet about it. Want to announce an open gym? Post on your Facebook page. The reach of both these services is far greater than you can hope to accomplish on your business website and they are both free.
Having a realistic plan on what your website for your gym should be and what it should accomplish significantly reduces the time and cost of this project and as well increases the effectiveness of what you are trying to accomplish. If you are looking for any guidance, feel free to contact us and see what we can come up with for you.