Most venue websites we audit are not badly designed. They are over-designed in the places that do not matter and under-built in the places that do. Here is the short list we would defend.
One obvious way to book, visible immediately
On a phone, above the fold, the first screen needs: what this place is, where it is, and a button that starts a booking. Not a menu. Not a mission statement. Not a carousel of three unrelated photographs that rotates before anyone can read it.
If your booking platform can deep-link to a specific class or court, link to it directly rather than dropping everyone on a generic booking home page. Every extra decision between "interested" and "paid" costs you conversions.
Real photographs of the real venue
Stock imagery is the fastest way to look like every competitor and to disappoint people on arrival. Two useful rules: photograph the space the way a customer sees it (entrance, parking, changing rooms, the actual court or studio), and photograph it in the light it will be in when most people visit.
Then respect the images technically. Compress them, serve them in WebP, cap the width at roughly twice the display size, and set explicit width and height so the layout does not jump while the page loads.
The details people actually search for
- Full address as plain text, with the postcode written normally, not stylised.
- Opening hours as text, including bank holidays and the days you are closed.
- A phone number that dials when tapped, on a real device, tested.
- Parking, and what it costs.
- What to bring, and what happens if it rains.
- Prices, or at minimum where prices start.
None of this is exciting. All of it is what a first-time visitor is looking for while deciding between you and the venue ten minutes closer.
One page per thing you sell
Courts, classes, the café, parties, memberships, coaching. Each one deserves a page that answers that specific question, because that is how people search and that is what Google can rank. A single "What we offer" page is a page that ranks for nothing.
Speed as a design constraint
Set a weight budget before the design starts, not after the developer complains.
A sensible target for a venue homepage is under about 1.5MB of images, with the hero not exceeding a few hundred kilobytes. When a homepage we looked at recently came down from roughly 15MB of images to 1.6MB, the layout did not change at all. The only difference was how long a stranger on mobile data waited before deciding to leave.
What to leave out
Auto-playing video with sound. A cookie banner that covers the booking button. A popup asking for an email before the visitor knows who you are. Three different fonts. A testimonials carousel nobody reads. An "Our Story" page longer than your class timetable.
Every one of those is a place where attention leaks out of the funnel. Remove them and the site gets better, immediately, for free.