• By Sam Parton
• In Blog
• Nov 6, 2015

5 Best Tools To Make Websites For Sports Venues

1. Wordpress

Probably the most renown tool for making websites, used by 1 million+ websites. The beauty of wordpress is that there are loads of templates, plugins and you can do a huge amount for FREE. For sports facilities Wordpress can cover most of what you want, as long as you have the time, patience and tenacity to play around with it.

Price: Free for Wordpress, Hosting £5-10/month

Search Engine Effectiveness: Very high

Pros: Lots of plugins built by others to make your site look slick. Lots of new mobile responsive themes such as Visual composer

Cons: Prone to hacking, templates can limit design Examples: www.hillsidegardens.co.uk, www.tennis-teaching.co.uk

2. Squarespace

 Squarespace focuses more on design and is geared towards eCommerce shops

Price: Around £10-20/month including Hosting

Search Engine Effectiveness: Moderate

Pros: Slick design, easy to use and maintain

Cons: Designs are quite fixed, lacks the functionality of Wordpress. Examples: www.seriousabouttennis.com www.barefootbowls.co.uk

3. Bootstrap

Bootstrap is a framework developed by Twitter which can help save a huge amount of time building customised websites. It is mobile responsive and offers a huge variety of pages, templates and ready made icons.

Search Engine Effectiveness: High

Cost: $20 for the template, £1,000+ for customisation if you need a designer

Pros: Very slick, ready made pages, mobile responsive, free upgrades, you don't need a designer

Cons: More expensive, requires customisation

4. Weebly

 Price: Free

Search Engine Effectiveness: Low

Pros: It's free and very easy to use. Simple set up, no coding skills needed, you could have a site up and running in

Cons: Limited functionality

5. Wix

A bit like Weebly, it offers a free way to make a website with no coding skills required. It is often used by sole traders or anyone needing a very basic website.

Search Engine Effectiveness: Low

Cost: Free

Pros: Free, easy to use

Cons: Limited functionality, restricted themes

Overall any of the website options above should easily do the job for most sports facilities unless you are something like Old Trafford in which case you probably want to spend a bit more... If there was one sports facility website framework it would probably be Wordpress simply because there are so many existing themes, templates and plugins. If you do have a higher budget it is worth looking at Bootstrap, just be prepared to pay £1,000+ for a website and it's probably unnecessary to spend much more than that.

If you need help creating a Sports Facility Website, just contact OpenPlay by emailing hi at openplay.co.uk as it is certainly something we can help with.