Martial Arts Website Design Priorities

Your website will often be the first time new, potential students see your school. So how do you make a good first impression online?  One of the most important things is to balance visual elements with function. Our Zen Planner web designer team always keep this in mind when we are building websites for martial arts schools across the country. Here are a few guidelines you should keep in mind for martial arts website design.

Show What Your School is All About

Chances are that you have given a tour of your school to a prospective student. You probably have done this multiple times and have a process to do so. Making sure to show them your space, show them a class in action and probably even introduced them to some of your instructors.

Your website should provide the same experience of that in person visit. This can be done by featuring high quality photos of your students, a wide-angle image of your school and friendly pictures of your staff. Also, having personal stories in your About Us section will give your business history authenticity and make your teachers relatable.

This authentic content will give visitors to your website an accurate impression of your business.

Keep it simple

Your website is like a modern day business card. Both should show people who you are, what you do, and provide contact information. By keeping this in mind, you’ll end up designing a lean, easy to maintain website.

This approach also considers how visitors “read” websites. Most site visitors look at pages for less than 15 seconds, only read 20% of the text and 80% of them won’t scroll below the fold. To provide students the experience and information they’re looking for, it’s best to spend your time on the top of page content and clear navigation.

This approach will also keep the #1 function for your website in focus, getting people to visit your business in-person.

Looking for more ways to improve your website? Check out our 10 Things Your Website Must Have Checklist!

Prompt Action

The ultimate goal of your website is to bring people to your school. Putting your contact information at the top of your website is a simple way to provide visitors a next step.

Another tried-and-true design strategy is using lead capture forms. These forms give visitors a way to sign up for a free lesson, newsletter or consultation in return for their contact info. With a solid marketing plan in place, you can re-engage these visitors through email or follow-up phone calls.

Lastly, put your class schedule online and enable people to register for a class through that schedule. Keeping this sign-up process within your website will make it easy for people to join your classes.

While there is much more that goes into a website, these concepts can act as guideposts to keep your website visitors in mind and the scale of your website design approachable.

While design elements are important, there’s more technical considerations that need to be made as well. Check our website checklist for these other important elements your martial arts website must have.