Some of the best golf courses in the world are in Northern California, so it’s no surprise that it’s home to a thriving community of people who are passionate about the sport. The Northern California Golf Association (NCGA) helps tie this community of golfers together, offering hundreds of events and tournaments, overseeing the Rules of Golf and administering official USGA handicaps, sponsoring exclusive golf discounts, and operating two member courses: Poppy Ridge and Poppy Hills.
The NCGA has supported golfers in Northern California for over one hundred years, but their digital assets were due for an overhaul. The goal? Making their websites easier to find and use in order to help grow their membership and drive engagement with their many events and initiatives. They also wanted to migrate their websites to HubSpot’s CMS Hub to ensure the new sites looked great, were easy to maintain, and tied into the rest of their marketing and membership technology.
The project
Smoothly migrating off of a legacy website that was built piecemeal on a platform like WordPress can feel like an insurmountable challenge, especially if you’re already struggling to manage the site as it is. But the truth is that running this kind of migration project is like planting a tree — the best time to do it is ten years ago, and the second-best time is today.
After years tangling with their current website, NCGA had a long list of goals they hoped to achieve when migrating to CMS Hub, starting with a more intuitive user experience from navigation through signup to make members’ lives easier. They needed a site that looked great, showcased their brand, scaled responsively on all devices, and was straightforward to manage on the back end.
In terms of KPI’s, NCGA’s goals were well-defined from the outset, with more qualified traffic and a higher conversion rate for membership at the top of the list. But there was one more thing that needed to be addressed: NCGA and one of their partners had three additional websites to rebuild in short order, and wanted to drive similar improvements across all four as efficiently as possible.
The challenge
The goal was clear: build the new NCGA website from the ground up in a way that would maximize the reusability of every element. This approach would allow us to ensure consistency across all four websites while also managing costs and timelines.
Like almost every website project here at Salted Stone, we kicked off the engagement with our Website Roadmapping process. This step was especially important in this case, because we knew that everything we built for the NCGA site would need to be easily reusable for three other sites: Youth on Course, Poppy Hills, and Poppy Ridge. Each site would have its own visual language but leverage the same core theme elements, and that meant pushing our standard “measure twice, cut once” approach to the extreme.
In addition to the careful planning around reusability, there were also a large number of different audience groups and jobs to be done across all four sites. It was important to create a user experience that felt intuitive on mobile devices, whether a user was booking a tee time, signing up for a program, or searching for a member course.
Overall, there wasn’t one seemingly-insurmountable technical challenge to overcome or a complex business model to translate for web audiences — for this project, the devil really was in the details. With so many interdependent elements, it was clear that the secret to success was going to be great communication, collaboration, and project management, and the teams at NCGA, YOC, Poppy Hills, and Poppy Ridge were up for the challenge.
Outcomes
The first of the four websites, NCGA.org, launched in January 2022, showcasing a new, user-focused navigational approach and clean, responsive design.
The lift was immediately felt by the user community and the internal website team. “We knew right away that all the careful planning had paid off, “ said Aimee Jackson, Acquisition, CRM & Social Manager at NCGA and Poppy Holdings, Inc. “It’s always hard to articulate your vision for something that’s complex in a way that’s simple, but Salted Stone’s team was with us every step of the way.”
Building on the success of the NCGA launch, our team dove into planning the next site for Youth on Course, connecting new ideas and audiences with the tools and infrastructure already created for NCGA.org.
For each successive site, visual styles were updated to match the corresponding brand identity, new user paths were mapped, and a complete top-to-bottom architecture was sketched out and validated.
As we got deeper into the projects, the pace of work continued to accelerate as we were able to leverage more and more that was already created. Our account team, led by Customer Success Manager Daniel Kwok and Account Manager Emma Milnamow, were constantly scanning the forward workload to identify opportunities to increase efficiency and velocity — and it paid off.
“We knew Salted Stone understood how to bring the creative and the technology together in a way that worked for our organizations,” Jackson says, “but what we couldn’t imagine on day one was how important the project management, and especially the communication, would be.”
Looking back on this project, the Salted Stone team has nothing but great things to say. According to Milnamow, “NCGA, YOC, and the teams at both clubs were the dream clients for us. They know their audience and they understand what their community is looking for, and know when to lean on us for the expertise we bring to a large-scale project like this. It was great to play the role of caddie to these pros, lending our insight on every tricky shot.”
Looking ahead, we’re excited to see these websites grow and evolve with their organizations, and to see the scalable tools we built put to use in service of golf lovers for years to come.
