Case study · Leisure and hospitality
Experience golflike never before.
Virtually Golf built something Lincoln had not seen before: simulator golf for people who play, people who have never played, and everybody in between. Our job was to make that land before anybody walked through the door.
- Client
- Virtually Golf
- Where
- Lincoln, Lincolnshire
- Sector
- Leisure and hospitality
- Built with
- WordPress, ACF, PHP
The client
Introducing golfing technologyto the masses.
Steve and Ronnie spent a long time getting Virtually Golf right: simulators serious enough for people who actually play, food and a bar good enough for everybody who came with them, and an atmosphere that lets both sorts of visitor feel like the place was meant for them.
That balance is the achievement. A venue can be taken seriously by a competitive golfer or it can be somewhere to bring eight people for a birthday, and most places pick one. This one holds both, and the website had to do the same thing.
There was nothing to copy. Every decision about how the place works was made from scratch, and it landed - the venue fills, the members come back, and the events sell out. What they were building towards was more than one of them, which is the point at which anything that only just works starts to matter.
The decision
The venue said one thing.The website said another.
The first site was built in-house on Squarespace, which is the right call when you are opening a venue and every hour you have belongs to the building. It did its job for a while. What it could not do was carry any of what the place is actually like, take a booking without friction, or be changed by the team on a Tuesday afternoon.
Steve did not need talking into replacing it. Anybody who had walked into the venue and then looked at the website could see the gap, and the only question worth asking was how far to go - which he answered by rebuilding the whole thing rather than dressing up what was there.
How it went
Birthdays, first dates,and rainy afternoons.
The most useful thing we learned had nothing to do with golf. Virtually Golf is not really selling golf - it is selling an afternoon, and the golf is what happens during it.
Steve gave us the time. Sessions on how people actually book, which events matter and why, what members expect, and the difference between somebody arriving for a birthday and somebody arriving to practise. None of it was written down anywhere; it was in the heads of the people running the place. The site is organised the way it is because of those conversations rather than because of a sitemap we drew.
01
We shot the place ourselves
Photography and film, made here rather than licensed: families, couples, students, a stag do and people who genuinely play, all in the venue on the same day. Something nobody has seen before cannot be described, only shown.
02
Booking in as few steps as we could get to
Most visitors arrive wanting a time and a bay. Everything else on the site is arranged so that those two things are never more than a moment away.
03
Built so the team can change it
Events, offers, memberships, news and leaderboards are theirs to edit. Nothing about running the venue should require ringing an agency.
What we built
From curiosity to excitementto a booking flow.
The live site, recorded rather than reconstructed - this one is public, so there was nothing to rebuild.
What changed
Same venue. New marketing.
99%of bookings come through the site
Almost nobody rings up any more. The booking that used to need a phone call, an answered phone and somebody free to take it now happens at eleven at night from a sofa, which is when people decide what they are doing at the weekend.
35%more page engagement
People stay and look rather than bounce off a booking form, which is what the photography and the film were for. Somebody who understands the place before they book arrives expecting the right thing.
Strongermember loyalty
This one Virtually Golf report rather than count, so it does not animate like the two above it. Members renew and come back more than they did, and the honest version of that is a word rather than a percentage somebody has reverse-engineered.
Unovo did not just redesign our website, they gave us a platform that finally matches the quality of the Virtually Golf experience. The new site feels premium, makes booking far easier for our customers, and gives us much more control behind the scenes.
Stephen Clark
Co-founder and Managing Director, Virtually Golf
Still going
One projectbecame a partnership.
The site did something beyond taking bookings: it gave Steve confidence that software could be an advantage rather than a compromise. We have since run a Wayfinder session together, mapping where the business is going and where something built for them would beat something bought off a shelf. The website was not the finish line. It was where we started thinking about the rest of it.
More of the work
No pitch, no deck
Tell us what isactually happening.
Describe the mess in your own words. We will say what we think is going on underneath it, and whether there is anything we could usefully do about it.
Unovo LimitedSteel City Stadium, Olympic Legacy Park
Worksop Road, Sheffield S9 3TL
Registered in England and Wales, company no. 16375453