How to make a club website that grows your membership

TL;DR: How to make a club website

This guide covers the site a members' club actually needs: the domain, a starting template, and the handful of pages a newcomer looks for, including a what's on page, a membership page with the annual dues on it, and a venue and function hire section. Yola website builder gives you Services and Pricing blocks for the membership tiers and hire rates, so the volunteer who looks after the site can change a figure the week the committee agrees it. There is no coding at any point.

The second half covers photographing an ordinary club night rather than the trophy cabinet, one customizable form that handles both joining and hall hire, the founding year, affiliations and insurance you can honestly show, a dates page you edit by hand for fixtures, socials and the AGM, and local search for phrases like "clubs to join in [city]". Work through the ten steps and the club has a site the next secretary can keep current without calling anyone.

What to include

Top features of a club website

How to make a club
website in 10 steps

Your domain is what somebody types after seeing it on a fixture card, a poster in the library or the sign outside the clubhouse. Use the club's name with your town in it, because most towns have a bowls club and a camera club already and yours needs to be the one that comes up. Take the .com if it is free. Leave out hyphens and numbers, since anyone repeating the name at the bar will drop both and end up nowhere.

Whatever you register, use the same name on your Google Business Profile, on the club's Facebook page and on the signage, so the three match. Yola website builder lets you search for and register a domain in the same flow you build the site in, and annual plans include a free domain for the first year. Register it in the club's name and its own email address rather than a member's personal one, because that is the thing nobody thinks about until the member with the account moves away.

Nobody on the committee needs to write code. Yola lets you edit text, swap photos and move sections the way you would edit a document, so the secretary can change a fixture or correct a name without tracking down the member whose nephew built the last site. That is the whole reason to build it this way: the person looking after the site will not be the same person in three years.

Answer a few questions about the club and Yola's AI Website Builder puts together a first draft to work from. The full set of AI tools sits on the paid plans, and the free plan has basic AI. Treat whatever comes back as a starting point and rewrite it in the club's own words, because a draft cannot know that you meet on Tuesdays and that juniors train at six.

Fast hosting, an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups come with the site, so there is nothing to set up and nothing for a volunteer to maintain. Start from a template that already carries a dated list, a gallery and a contact form, rather than a blank page.

Start from a template

Templates for a club website

Six pages cover a club. Keep the set small on purpose, because every extra page is one more thing the next volunteer has to keep current, and a club site goes stale faster than almost any other kind.

Two of the six do most of the work. What's on tells somebody whether there is a reason to come down this week, and Membership tells them what joining actually involves. The other four hold up those two. If function hire grows into a real line in the accounts, give it a page of its own later.

Build these first and add the extras once the essentials are live:

This is where you set out what the club offers, which for most clubs is membership first and the room second. Name each one the way the committee names it in the minutes rather than in marketing language, because members and hirers both search for the plain word. Services and Pricing are ready-made Yola blocks, so the layout is done and a fee change is one number and a save.

Put a figure against everything you can. A club that publishes its annual dues gets fewer calls that go nowhere and more people who have already decided. Where a price honestly depends on the booking, say what it depends on, give a from figure for a standard Saturday, and send the rest to the form. Hire rates that exist only in the steward's head cost you bookings from people who will not phone to ask.

This is the step that decides whether anybody ever walks through the door. Somebody thinking about joining a club they have never been to is trying to picture one thing, and it is not the annual dinner or the trophy presentation. It is an ordinary Tuesday. They want to know roughly how many people are there, roughly what age they are, what everyone is wearing and whether a stranger walking in alone would feel like an idiot.

So photograph an ordinary Tuesday. Twelve people at the tables with the lights on, somebody mid-sentence at the bar, the green or the hall actually in use, coats on the hooks and half-finished drinks on the table. Shoot straight on, in whatever light the room has, and get people in the frame; an empty hall reads as a club nobody attends. Ask the room first and leave out anyone who would rather not be in it. Real photos of a slightly untidy evening beat polished shots of an empty room every time, because untidy is what the visitor is checking for.

Show the building too, and especially the parts people get wrong: which door to use, where the parking is, the stairs up to the function room, the sign on the road that is easy to miss. A newcomer who cannot find the entrance turns around and drives home, and you never hear about it. If the club has a junior section or a beginners' night, photograph that separately and label it, because those are the two things a nervous first-timer looks for hardest.

Galleries is a ready-made Yola block, so building the gallery itself is a few clicks, and on a paid plan the Custom code block lets you lay one out exactly how you want. Name the files properly before you upload, so springfield-bowls-club-clubhouse.jpg rather than IMG_4471.jpg, which helps the photos turn up in image search. Yola's paid plans also include a library of premium icons, useful for section headings, though never for the club nights themselves. Short video earns its place here as well: thirty seconds of a real club night, filmed on a phone, answers more questions than a paragraph can. Video is not a Yola block, so that is content you shoot and host, then point at from the page.

One form covers both of the things people contact a club about: they want to join, or they want to hire the room. The Yola contact form is customizable rather than pre-made, so you pick the fields instead of working around somebody else's set.

Keep it to what you need in order to reply. A name, an email, a phone number, and a dropdown for what they are asking about: joining, hall hire, or something else. Add a date field and a rough headcount for hire inquiries, since those two answers are what the person with the diary needs before they can say yes. Everything else can wait for the phone call. A long form on a club site reads like an application to something, and half the people who started it will not finish.

Yola sends an automatic confirmation, so the sender knows it landed and does not send it twice. Then somebody has to actually answer. Agree at the next committee meeting who checks that inbox and how fast, and put it in the minutes; two days is the outside limit for a joining inquiry, because interest in joining a club fades quickly. The setup is walked through in the help center's Forms block article.

A club holds no professional license, so trust here is built out of time, numbers and who you answer to. Where the club has been running since 1954, put the founding year in the header where people see it rather than three paragraphs into the About page. Where you are happy to publish a current member count, publish it, because a number tells a visitor the club is alive in a way that adjectives cannot.

A few more are worth a line each where they apply to you. If the club is affiliated with a county association or a national governing body, name it. If the clubhouse holds a liquor or entertainment license, saying so answers a hirer's first question. And where you carry public liability cover, or you have a safeguarding policy and a named first aider because juniors train with you, say so plainly on the page a parent will read. None of this should ever be claimed unless it is genuinely in place.

This is the page people check before they decide to come down, and it is the first one to go stale. A site still advertising last spring's league night tells a visitor the club has quietly folded, which is the exact opposite of what you built it for. One volunteer keeping this current is worth more than every other improvement on the list.

Every entry needs five things: the date, the start time, where in the building it happens, what it costs if anything, and whether to just turn up or let somebody know first. That last one matters more than clubs realize. Mark clearly which nights a visitor can walk into, because a newcomer reading a wall of members-only fixtures has no way in and will assume there isn't one. Put the AGM, the open day and the annual dinner on the same page as the fixtures, so the whole year is visible in one scroll.

Yola has no calendar feature, and this page is not one. It is a page you edit by hand, which is genuinely the practical answer for a club: adding a date is typing a line and saving, and the secretary can do it from a phone on the way home from the meeting. Anyone who wants to reserve a place goes through the inquiry form from the previous step, not through ticketing or a booking system.

Keep the past dates up. Move them into a short recent list underneath the upcoming ones instead of deleting them as they go by. Ten entries from the last three months is the most convincing thing on the whole site, because it proves the club meets, on the nights it says it meets, and that the AGM happened and was minuted. A page showing only the future looks like a plan. A page showing both looks like a club.

Somebody new in town looking for a club to join starts on Google or on a map, and they type the activity and the place. Your job is to be what comes back. There is no advertising budget involved in this and most clubs do none of it.

Nearly all of the work happens off your own site, on Google's free tools, and it takes an evening to set up and ten minutes a month after that. A Yola site is SEO optimized in its build, so the pages are readable to search engines without you touching anything technical, but the profile and the reviews are yours to do.

Work down this list in order. The first two items are worth more than the other four put together:

Before you tell anyone it is live, go through it on a phone the way a stranger would. Tap the phone number and check it dials. Send the inquiry form to yourself, pick hall hire, and confirm the automatic confirmation arrives and the message reaches the inbox somebody actually reads. Check the next three dates on the what's on page are right, and that the map drops the pin on the clubhouse rather than the church next door. Yola sites are mobile optimized and responsive, so the layout handles itself, but none of that tests whether the form goes to a live address.

After that, the only real maintenance is the dates. Club sites die the month their one volunteer moves away, so put the login in the club's own email account rather than a personal one, keep the password wherever you keep the bank mandate, and make updating the dates a standing item on the committee agenda. Automatic SSL and automatic backups run on their own. The point of building it this way is that the next secretary can take it over with a password and ten minutes of showing, and no developer is involved at any stage.

Common club website mistakes to avoid

The same handful of mistakes turn up on club sites, and most of them cost you the one person who was nearly ready to come down.

How much does a club website cost?

On Yola the site starts free, and a paid plan is $9.95/mo when you want the club's own domain, more pages and the full AI tools. Annual plans include a free domain for the first year. For a club running on subscriptions and bar takings, that sits below almost every other line in the accounts, and it is a figure the treasurer can put in front of the committee without a discussion.

Paying somebody to build it costs a great deal more. A freelancer or a small agency building a comparable site often runs from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, and that is before the part clubs regularly get caught by: a small fee every time somebody has to change a fixture date, which for a club is most weeks in season.

That is really the argument for building it yourselves. The money matters, but what matters more is who can edit the thing. A club committee turns over, and the site has to survive that. When the secretary changes hands, the handover is a password and a short walkthrough, and the new volunteer can move a match date the same evening without asking anyone's permission or paying for the privilege.