Golf club website design: what members actually use

Golf club websites serve a different visitor from most sports sites. Nearly all the traffic is members and visitors wanting to play, not supporters following a team.

What the traffic is actually doing

1. Booking a tee time — members and visitors, easily the largest share
2. Checking competition results — and handicap changes
3. Course status — open, carts, temporary greens, weather
4. Green fees and visitor information — the revenue page
5. Membership — categories and joining

Note that news is not on the list. Golf club sites often lead with a news feed nobody reads, while course status sits three clicks deep.

Booking is not something to rebuild

Golf tee-sheet systems are mature and members already know them. A website should link cleanly into whichever system the club uses, not attempt to replace it.

Any web vendor proposing to rebuild your tee sheet is proposing something expensive and worse than what exists.

Visitors and green fees

For most clubs this is the commercial page. It needs pricing, availability, dress code, buggy hire and a route to book, all visible without hunting.

It is also the page most likely to be found in search by someone who has never visited, which makes it worth writing properly rather than as a table of numbers.

The member area

Competition results, handicaps, fixtures, minutes, bar and event information. Usually behind a login, and usually the ugliest part of the site.

Worth caring about, because it is where the people who pay the club's bills spend their time.

Where sponsorship fits

Golf has strong local sponsorship — hole sponsors, competition sponsors, board partners — and almost no club can say what any of it delivered. The same measurement problem as every other sport, with an audience that is unusually attractive to advertisers.

If your club sells sponsorship, how to build and price sponsorship packages applies as much to golf as to rugby.

Course status, done properly

This is the highest-value element on a golf club site and it is almost always buried. The requirements are simple and rarely met:

• Visible at the top of the homepage without scrolling, on a phone
• Updated by the greenkeeper from a phone, not by a webmaster
• Time-stamped, so a member knows whether it is current
• Three states minimum: open, carts restricted, closed — with a line of detail
• Pushed to members who opt in, rather than requiring them to check

A member deciding at 6am whether to drive over wants one line. Get that right and the rest of the site matters considerably less.

The visitor page as a revenue page

For most clubs, green fee income from visitors is the page with direct commercial consequence, and it is usually a table of prices with no persuasion attached.

What a visitor actually needs before booking:

• Green fees by day and season, clearly
• Available tee times, or a direct route to the booking system
• Dress code, stated plainly rather than implied
• Buggy and trolley hire and cost
• What the course is like — length, par, character, a few photographs
• Catering and clubhouse access for visitors

This page is also the one most likely to be found in search by someone who has never visited, which makes it worth writing properly rather than assembling from a spreadsheet.

Competitions and handicaps

Members check results and handicap movements more often than any other content. The site should surface:

• Recent competition results, by competition
• Upcoming competitions and entry
• Order of merit or season-long standings
• Links into the handicapping system rather than a duplicate of it

As with tee sheets, do not rebuild the handicap system. Link into it cleanly and keep the website's job to presentation and discovery.

Where sponsorship fits in golf

Golf has unusually strong local sponsorship — hole sponsors, competition sponsors, board partners, society day backers — and an audience that is genuinely attractive to advertisers.

What almost no club can do is say what any of it delivered. A hole sponsor pays annually and receives a board and a mention, with no figure attached to either. The same measurement discipline that applies in rugby and cricket applies here, and the audience is worth more per head.

How to structure and price it is in building sponsorship packages.

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