Project Details

Client: Dwayne
Date: February 2021
Skills: Web Design
Visit: https://www.innisfailgolf.ca/

Number of Pages

Turnaround Days

The Client

The Innisfail Golf Club has been a client of mine for over 13 years, in a number of different capacities that varied from year to year. I originally designed a new website for them right after I graduated from Graphic/Web Design school in 2011. Since then, we have had redesigned the site a few times over the years and in 2021 I am proud to present IGC 3.0. The site is now live and I couldn’t be more excited about the finished product.

Conceptualize

At the end of the 2020 golf season, I approached Dwayne and his team about updating the look and feel of the site, as it had been 6 years since we had looked at it. Through our discussions, we nailed down some specific goals that were important to the club in this venture.

  • Create a new, fresh look for new and returning visitors alike
  • Update the layout to reflect the changing focus of the club
  • Increased mobile-user functionality
  • Increased SEO rankings with more SEO friendly tags, titles, formatting, and content
  • Increased visitor numbers (including the length of stay, pages visited, etc.)
  • Consistent branding message across advertising platforms
  • Create more CTA (call to actions) – directing people to ‘Book a Tee Time’ and different parts of the website

Over the years, the focus of the marketing plan and the club itself has changed, with the last two seasons being no different. We needed to examine what those changes were and focus on the organization of the site (especially the homepage) accordingly – so that we are providing the right information to the site visitors.

Create

The creative process actually started during the 2020 season, where I spent 3 days taking new pictures of each of the 27 holes. I am not a photographer by any stretch and I do wish I had better images to work with, but for what I need, they turned out perfect. As mentioned before, I have been involved with the club in a number of capacities over the years, and in the 2020 season that included social media management. As I was creating social media content I also developed a branding guide – I would use this branding guide in the development of font hierarchy, colour scheme, and general aesthetics of the new site design. From a content and organizational perspective, Dwayne and his team provide me with what information they wanted the site to focus on for the homepage.

I started by developing a page ‘template’ from a page organization, colour scheme, and font hierarchy perspective, that could be carried out through the entire site. Once a working template was approved, it was simply a manner of applying it to the existing (but heavily edited) content. The hole-by-hole walkthroughs are the part of the website I am most proud of. It is not something you see on every golf course website, and as an avid golfer, I wish it was. Each page provides views and information on each hole – giving perspective players a good understanding of what faces them at IGC.

As with all my designs, I had to ensure the organization and design of the site worked as well on mobile devices as it did on a desktop. This lead to some reorganization of the layout sitewide to allow for better flow when viewing from mobile devices. Once that was completed the site was done! It was a marathon that quickly turned into a sprint, as management was hoping to have the site live by March 1, 2021 (which I was able to accomplish).

Communicate

The final redesign is a mobile-friendly, modern, photo-focused design that is filled with beautiful photos (some provided by my golf buddies – thanks FISH!), information about the club, and CTA (call-to-action) buttons. By adjusting the text hierarchy and following 2021 best practices for SEO, the Innisfail Golf Club is sure to see an increase in web traffic moving forward.

Graphic Design Skills Used: Website Structure, Layout Design, Copy Editing, Graphics Creation, CSS and Layout Customization

Are you looking for a Website?