Refining The User Experience For A Small Gym's Website To Attract New Clients

Project Overview

True Strength MMA is a small business gym based out of Roswell, GA. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they were forced to shut down operations and we're only a few months away from having to permanently close their doors.

I wanted to help the gym however I could to help them bring in new clients after government restrictions were lifted. When I took a look at their website, they were still using a heavily outdated GoDaddy website builder site and it was incredibly difficult to use. After discussions with the gym owner, we came to an agreement and I provided them a brand new website that delivered increased site traffic and a huge jump in incoming leads.

What's The Product?

The original True Strength MMA website was using a very outdated GoDaddy Website Builder template that was not mobile-friendly and was incredibly hard to use. The websites' primary function was to promote the gym's classes available to customers as well as provide class times.

The new website is hosted via SquareSpace, allowing me to produce a quality product in a short timeframe under the clients overall marketing budget.

Who's The User?

The gym's primary target audience was tailored to men ages 16-35. Combat Sports is heavily male-dominated and we wanted to promote the perception that True Strength MMA was one of the top gyms to train and develop their skills in the Roswell, GA area.

What's The Goal?

The primary goal for this website was to increase overall brand visibility by leveraging search engine results as well as ultimately generate quality leads.

The Process

Before I started any design or UX work, I conducted base-level research by interviewing the gym owner and a few of the current gym members. By conducting an interview with the gym owner, I was able to understand what type of clients he wanted to attract, which helped during the content writing portion of this project (which will not be discussed in this case study). By interviewing existing clients, I was able to get a gauge of what classes were considered "in-demand", which helped me structure the new sitemap and eventual home page. The interviews with current gym members also assisted in determining that search engine visibility was going to be very important with the new site launch, as this is how many of them discovered the gym's presence.

The Sitemap

The sitemap needed to be straightforward/to-the-point. When talking to potential users, they want to easily see what classes are available without having to do too much digging.

One unconventional recommendation I shared with the gym owner was to include up-front pricing on the website. Gyms today share a trend of hiding their pricing from users and "bait" them into coming into their doors and allow them to take a free trial, only for these users to learn the sometimes insane membership costs per month. By including the pricing up front, this eliminates any potential surprises, maximizing lead conversions into paying customers.

The User Flows

With the primary goal of the new website to increase overall inbound traffic and generate more leads, I needed to construct a path easy enough for users to follow once they landed on the new True Strength MMA website.

The user flow demonstrates the straightforward path for users to convert to leads:

The Results

The User Experience, SEO and Development work I completed on this project led to the gym skyrocketing their overall site traffic, montly leads and conversions. The gym has demonstrated significant growth since the time we launched the new site.