At the end of October we were thrilled to launch the new online presence for Swan Leisure.

The Swan Leisure brand is driven by community and family. When we were lucky enough to be asked to develop their new online presence, we knew we wanted to keep that community aspect to the forefront. At the same time, and of course like all websites, design and visual aesthetic was extremely important. And perhaps most important of all was a requirement to encourage membership sign ups.

At the end of our design and development process, we were absolutely delighted with the final result. Our finished site is elegant, functional and looks great. We love it, and more importantly, so does the client:

“We spent a lot of time researching web design companies to make sure that we chose the right designers for our business. What led us to choose Kooba was the creativity that you can see in their work. Each site is a unique project so your business really stands out from the crowd with a professional, innovative website. The team at Kooba listened to everything we had to say and used this information to deliver a site that looks great and is optimised for user functionality. The process was very smooth - once we met with the project manager a calendar of work was created and we could see daily what work had been completed. The timeline was kept and the changeover from our old site to new was seamless.” - Clodagh Kilmurray, Chief Executive Officer

The company

Based in Rathmines, Dublin, Swan Leisure is a community health and fitness center that strives to help its members maintain a more active and healthy lifestyle. The organisation offers an array of classes, facilities (including a state of the art swimming pool) and personal training to support whatever fitness or health goal an individual is looking to achieve.

Swan Leisure prides itself on its community driven, family value brand - and was looking to showcase this brand in every part of its business.

Business objectives

For Swan Leisure, objectives were clear and straightforward. Firstly, they wanted to increase the number of members joining online for both classes and full memberships.

Secondly, they sought to deliver an outstanding interactive online experience that reflected the top class facilities they provided.

Thirdly, they wanted an accessible site for all users with organized, tidy sitemap and a simple navigation.

The Swan Leisure website

The first step in creating a new Swan Leisure site began with a reconfigured sitemap. A vital stage in any project, a good sitemap ensures that information is structured logically and that user journeys are simple rather than complex. Our sitemap focused on core user journeys and a relatively flat structure ensured everything was easy to find.

When it came to content, Swan Leisure wanted the new site to be less text heavy and more visually immersive. Using existing videos and images, we were able to use full width images and image carousels to communicate the Swan experience in a natural and intuitive fashion, without requiring large walls of text.

At every stage our team aimed to make the Swan Leisure as user friendly as possible by ensuring relevant information was always at hand and clearly signposted.. Taking the Swimming page as an example, we built a single interactive page with an internal navigation - this allowed the user to easily browse through the options from a single location rather than navigate through multiple pages.

This idea was extended to the classes page, where we put the full range of classes in one interactive page to make viewing, browsing and booking easy and straightforward. The page gives overviews of the classes and then separates them into class types to help the user find their ideal class.

With the user in mind, interactive timetables were created for both classes and the pool to allow for easy access to scheduling and the ability to filter by day or class/activity type.

We also added a News & Events section which incorporated Swan Leisure’s social media activity. Previously news and events promoted on Swan Lesiure’s social media were not displayed on the website. By integrating social media content within the website, Swan Leisure was able to showcase promotions and keep platforms consistent.

SEO content & lead generation

Last but certainly not least, we worked hard with the client to optimise the new site for SEO purposes.. The new site content is as search friendly as possible whilst remaining in line with the Swan brand - and readable to humans! Throughout the site we took care to ensure all relevant title and description fields were optimised for SEO, one example being the home page description which reads : ‘Exceptional leisure facility with high service levels, superior fitness classes, spotless facilities and a commitment to guide members to achieve their fitness goals.’

Journal full list