Websites / A practical guide
What should a golf club
website project include?
A clear brief covers the visitor journey, content, design, connections, search, ownership and launch. Agreeing those things early gives your club and its website partner a useful starting point.
Start with the job the website needs to do.
A website project should start with your club's priorities. You may need more visitor bookings, clearer membership enquiries or a better route for society organisers. Agree which journeys matter before discussing layouts.
Give each journey a useful next step and identify who at the club will handle the response. A good brief explains what success would look like, without promising a result the website alone cannot deliver.
Make the different journeys easy to follow.
Prospective members, visitors and society organisers arrive with different questions. Plan the pages around the information each needs: what is available, what the experience includes and how to enquire or book.
Start with an inventory of the existing site. Decide what to keep, combine, rewrite or retire. If you change a URL, include its destination in the migration plan rather than leaving old links behind.
Agree the words and imagery as part of the build.
Ask who will write the copy, supply photographs, organise filming and approve the work. These are part of making the site useful, not details to solve at the end.
Your club's identity should carry through the page designs. Choose imagery that helps someone understand the place and experience. Include formats and usage rights in the brief so your team knows where the assets can be used.
Be precise about bookings and enquiries.
A link to a booking platform, an embedded form and a direct system integration are different pieces of work. Ask which approach is included and what the visitor will experience.
For enquiries, agree the receiving team, the information collected, the confirmation message and the follow-up responsibility. If CRM or a website assistant is part of the plan, check its scope and supported connections explicitly.
Include search and migration in the scope.
Discuss page titles, helpful headings, useful answers and links between related pages. Important information should be available as readable page content, with photographs and video supporting the explanation.
Ask for a migration plan, a check of production indexing settings and an agreed approach to measurement. Clarify which search work is part of the build and which ongoing content or optimisation is separate. Rankings and inclusion in AI answers should not be promised.
Know what your team can manage.
Agree editing access, training, hosting, support and responsibility for future changes. Ask what the team can update themselves and what needs supplier help.
The handover should identify who controls the domain, hosting account and relevant assets. It should also record how to get support and what the ongoing agreement covers.
Test the full journey before launch.
Review the site on desktop and mobile. Follow the important routes, submit test enquiries, check where they arrive and confirm what happens when a form fails.
Check existing links, redirects, video controls and keyboard access. Make someone responsible for the launch decision and early monitoring. A finished design is one part of the handover; the website also needs to work for the people visiting it and the team receiving the interest.
Your next website
Start with what your club needs.
Capture Sites brings website strategy, design and managed delivery together. We agree the content, journeys, supported connections and ongoing care around your club.