As the world becomes increasingly digitized, a website is essential for any type of business in the fitness industry. Whether you are a YMCA, local gym, health club, personal trainer, or another type of fitness facility, ensuring your clients and customers, as well as future prospects, can find your fitness organization online to learn about your products and services is imperative for success and growth.
In the highly competitive fitness industry, your fitness website is where customers and visitors discover important information, such as exercise class schedules, products, services, and educational resources, as well as contact information like where they can find your fitness center and how to get in touch with your team.
By providing a reliable website, you’re making it easy for customers and prospects to learn more about your fitness organization and how you can help them achieve their health and wellness goals.
However, with technological innovations and the expectations of modern-day consumers, websites for fitness facilities and organizations can no longer be basic and outdated.
Websites for YMCAs, gyms, wellness centers, and other fitness organizations must look and feel professional, implement a mobile-ready website design, and be easy to use and navigate for an exceptional user experience.
Additionally, for many businesses in the fitness industry, including convenient online services is essential for empowering your customers and visitors to seamlessly access updated class schedules, learn about various class offerings, find an experienced trainer, or access health and wellness information from the comfort of their own home.
Furthermore, you might want to include a variety of other features and functionalities designed for a custom fitness website, such as scheduling a personal training session, accessing a paid customer portal with additional resources, live chatting with a certified trainer, and more.
But building a fitness website for your YMCA, gym, personal training business, or wellness center starts with one basic question -- what is the most important purpose for your website?
The experienced team at Studio 78 is here to help you answer that question and provide a completely custom website designed and developed for your fitness organization.
Once our team helps you determine the purpose of your fitness website, we’ll next cover a few more questions to get even more clear on the list of features and functions needed to support your site’s purpose. This may include questions like, Who will most likely visit your website? What type of device will they be using? Why are they coming to your website? And how will they use your website?
When creating and building custom websites for YMCAs, gyms, wellness centers, and other fitness facilities, we always implement a few site features crucial for functionality and site success.
Utilizing the latest technologies and best practices we design responsive website layouts that seamlessly adapt and look great on any device. We don’t use templates*, so you get a truly custom fitness website that is unique and one-of-a-kind.
*All websites for YMCAs will be created using the Open Y platform to follow brand standards and visions for a cohesive appearance.
Studio 78 has numerous clients in the fitness industry, particularly YMCAs across the United States. This is why we have developed security-focused procedures and products to ensure our client’s websites stay protected. All of our clients enjoy the benefits of our secure hosting solutions including IT Penetration Testing, due diligence, secure online forms, and much more.
Studio 78 is committed to building accessible websites. Our web design and custom coding always meets criteria for accessibility so everyone can have access to your fitness website, even users with disabilities that may need to use different technologies to navigate through a site.
We have teamed up with third party accessibility experts to provide you with an independent audit of your website to assure accessibility compliance. Not only do we know it is good for our clients and their customers, but it is the right thing to do.
Site security is essential to ensure your users, customers and clients feel safe and protected when sharing their sensitive information. Studio 78 offers domain and organizational secure certificates for our fitness clients.
Additionally, we facilitate vetting, maintenance, and renewal of your domain’s SSL certificates for ongoing security.
Studio 78 is committed to building accessible websites. Our web design and custom coding always meets criteria for accessibility so everyone can have access to your fitness website, even users with disabilities that may need to use different technologies to navigate through a site.
website features we include when designing and developing client websites, take a look at this page on website services and design.
You might have noticed this already but not all Fitness websites are alike and they are definitely not created equal. At Studio 78, we use a couple different methods to help our clients build out a website that functions and performs optimally for their business. This includes a Content Management Systems (CMS) website or a custom built website.
A Content Management System website is constructed so that you can manage changes to your website any time you want. A CMS is software that has to be installed on a large computer called a web server.
Many of the popular CMS programs like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, or Concrete5 are “open source code.” That means the program was developed by programmers and managed by a nonprofit organization. You can download and install the program for free. When it is installed you will have the ability to log into the admin area of the software and make changes or edits to the website.
It is designed to help nontechnical users maintain their content, such as text and images. If you have some knowledge or experience with websites, more advanced changes can also be made to the website, like adding more pages and changing the navigation. But you will likely need to learn how to do these more technical edits with some help or you can hire a website programmer to develop your CMS for you. Then going forward you can manage the website content yourself.
Layouts for website pages will determine where key components or features of a website will be located on any given page. Examples are where you position your logo, text, images, etc. on the page.
When a website is created, it oftentimes involves a web designer and a web developer. The designer is focused on the look and feel of the website, including things like the placement of the logo, the style and color of the page(s), and the placement of the navigation bar.
On the other hand, a web developer utilizes web code to recreate the designed layout. Web code is what a browser reads and interprets so that it can recreate the layout seen on your computer. Developers take an element, such as a button or image, and can assign a behavior to it. For example, a button may be assigned the behavior of “go to the next page” when clicked.
With custom design you would work with a web designer first to determine your preferences for the layout, including where you want your logo, pictures, and text placed on the page. If you choose to use a pre-designed template, the design is already done and you can then work with the developer to apply your content and images on the home page and subsequent pages that make up your website. You can learn more about the dos and don’ts of website layouts by searching for more information on that topic.
A website template is often purchased for a modest fee and then installed as part of your CMS. A template, such as a Fitness website template, is designed by someone else and then sold to people who are creating a website on a CMS program.
In contrast to a template, a custom layout will be specific and unique to you and your needs. You can think of it as buying a new home. You can buy a house in a neighborhood and all of the homes look the same because they were all built by the same contractor, or you can sit down with a contractor and tell him what you want and he will build it for you and to your specifications.
There is a consensus that a custom-built website has marketing advantages over a templated website. Most Fitness organizations, such as a family health clinic or small medical practice, want to be recognized as different and unique from their competition. When you stand out from the crowd, you have a huge marketing advantage over your competition. Being distinct, unique, and memorable will go a long way in your marketing efforts.
If not going with a CMS website, your other choice is to have a website designed and developed by professionals. This option will limit some of your editing ability and you will need to submit your desired changes to the web developer and they will make the changes for you.
However, the real advantage with this option is that you will have a minimal learning curve compared to managing a CMS. Using web service providers is much the same as using a plumber, electrician, or an accountant. They are all specialized in their field, can help you out whenever needed, and the job will be done right.
In summary, here are the essential questions you need to ask when determining what type of website is best for your Fitness organization.
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