Last month I launched a new Martial Arts Website for a small Dojo in White River Junction, Vermont.
White River Budokan is a traditional dojo with some world class instructors, Head Instructor Ron Treem was recently featured in the Valley News. It needed a clean design that reflected its traditional approach.
The site is also on WordPress, as have been most of my recent launches. It uses a professional theme, Genesis from StudioPress. As I used to own a template company, I know the benefit of starting a web project with a high quality theme, and generally always do so for my clients. It saves a significant amount of time and expense. This particular theme is designed to be fast and better for search engine visibility. That’s important for a small business website, helping to maintain the dojo’s search presence in Google.
Two important client features were ease of posting and using video clips.
Some of the instructors had recently been taking short video clips of martial arts techniques and posting them to their YouTube account. They wanted to be able to easily post them on the website.
A WordPress category served as the container for the Media Library. Then, leveraging JetPack, posts can be made and the actual YouTube url used as the shortcode for the video. This makes it very easy for the client and not having to worry about creating a HTML link or messing around with containing code denoters.
The second important feature was super-easy posting. As very busy business owners, the instructors don’t have time to even make it into the WordPress backend. They needed something easier.
Again, JetPack was useful by leveraging its Post by Email feature. Using this, the instructors can send a simple test email to the site and have it create a post. Already they have been taking advantage of this and increased the amount of news and information they are able to put up on the site. Previously this was only done through their Facebook page.
Check out the site, and if you know of anyone looking for a martial arts dojo in the Upper Valley, I highly recommend them!
Kids Class at White River Budokan