Solihull Riding Club has grown from a small members’ riding club to the UK’s largest riding club, and a renowned equestrian event venue. With over 75 years of history, their 220-acre site boasts top-tier facilities, including one of the largest indoor arenas in the country as well as permanent stabling, catering to riders of all levels and disciplines.
Their size and prestige needed to be well represented online; based on their own experience, and user feedback, they knew it was time to rethink the way their website was working for them.
Solihul Riding Club’s website is the primary destination to communicate the services they offer, including membership information, venue bookings, and event and competition communications.
Before this project began, the website served to only publish information, so the club relied heavily on its admins to handle processes like membership sign ups, manage their member directory and take venue booking requests and payments.
The Club knew that to improve the efficiency in running their operations, they needed to automate some of their processes and provide self service features.
Significant time resources were being used to manage their membership database. Administrators were required to keep track of their members, send out manual membership renewal reminders, and take manual payments. Admins were also required to reconsile payments made directly to their bank accounts or by cheque with the members renewals.
The website is the clubs key resource for attracting and retaining members, as well as providing important information about their events, competitions and competitor information. It was, therefore, a significant priority to update the website and to bring it line with their reputation and branding as a well established and prestigeous riding club.
Although their website was serving as a helpful source of information for the club’s services and how to consume them, new and existing members were left to either message or call the club to book and pay for venue hire and membership renewals, further adding to their increasing admin overhead.
One of the most important steps in redesigning a website is to understand your customers and what motivates them to purchase. The exsiting website was difficult to navigate and slowed the users journey to what it was they were looking for.
The club needed a website redesign with modern visuals and new functionality so that they could meet their goals of automating processes and reducing administrative costs.
A website user journey is the step-by-step path a user takes to navigate a website, including interactions, decisions, and experiences, from their entry point to achieving a specific goal. It’s important to understand the journeys your users will make early in the development process.
Working closely with Solihul Riding Club we worked to understand who their target market is and to identify the types of individuals who are most likely to interact with their website. Armed with this information, specific user journeys were crafted to make it easy and intuative for users to reach their goals and convert.
As the largest and oldest riding club in the UK, Solihull Riding Club’s online presence needed to represent their heritage and their brand. Working closely with the club to fully understand how to represent them visualy, along with user journeys, is what lead the design process.
One of the clubs biggest challenges was to bring self service and automation into their membership sign up and management processes. Integrating a dedicated membership management system with the website was key in achieving this goal. This new system solved all of the requirements the club set out to reduce significantly admin time and improve their users experience.
The club organises and hosts hundreds of events per year so it’s vital that they can easily maintain their event diary to provide the most up to date information to their members, competitors and visitors. Their specific requirements to communicate events meant that a off the shelf templates would not be appropriate and a custom events front end was the answer.
Club administrators can easily add and update events through a simple events dashboard.
With so many fantasic and well designed tools available for booking it makes sense to integrate them directly with your website to get the most out of them. Solihul Riding Club manage their venu hire via a third party booking system which integrates directly with their website ensuring their visitors have a seemless and clean experience.
Since developing their new website Solihull Riding Club have been able to focus more of their time on promoting events, hiring out their venues, and growing their member base.
Freeing up time for the whole team was one of the most significant outcomes for this project. The time spent on the lengthy and manual processes within the club was reallocated to business development helping to grow the club’s members base.
The clubs member base grew year on year following the introduction of online membership sign up, secure recurring payment processing, and member self service features. Empowering new and existing members to manage their own membership renewals, updates, and personal details not only reduces admin costs, it improves customer satisfaction.
It was clear that Solihull Riding Club’s previous website was dated, inefficient, and slow. They now have a clean, modern, secure, and fast website which properly represents their brand and the high quality of services they offer.
Our new website from Weaving Webs has been a game-changer for our riding club. The event calendar, arena booking, and membership sign-up features have streamlined our operations and made it so much easier for members to sign up and stay engaged.
The site’s modern design and seamless functionality set us apart from other equestrian centres, giving us a real edge in attracting and retaining members. The team at Weaving Webs truly understood our needs and delivered a solution that exceeded our expectations. We’re thrilled with the result!
Alex Richards – Solihull Riding Club
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