Barnsley Premier Leisure (Your Space)

Overview

Barnsley Premier Leisure run leisure across South Yorkshire and beyond, trading as Your Space: ten clubs from Bircotes to Worksop, the Barnsley Metrodome with its waterpark and Adventure Reef, a golf business, a swim academy and a gymnastics academy.

When we came in, all of that was scattered across separate websites built and maintained by different providers. It’s now one platform. Between them the sites take more than 1.5 million visits a year.

The challenge

Every club had its own website. Every website had its own provider, its own build and its own idea of what the brand looked like.

That’s expensive in a way that doesn’t show up on a single invoice. The same security update, the same accessibility fix, the same new feature, paid for again and again across the estate. Nobody could say with confidence which site was current. And when one of them slipped behind, it was never the one you’d choose — it was whichever one a customer happened to land on that day.

The analytics told the story on their own. There was a separate tracking property sitting behind Bircotes, Dearneside, Retford and Worksop, each one measuring its own little island of a website, none of them talking to each other.

Underneath it, a simpler problem: somebody who goes swimming at the Metrodome and takes a class at Royston is one customer. Across a dozen disconnected websites, they looked like a dozen different people.

What we did

Took control of the estate

First job was to get everything in one place, off four different providers and onto a platform we ran. That meant migrating the sites, consolidating what had drifted, and retiring the per-club websites in favour of one Your Space site that can speak for all ten clubs.

Built one platform, many front doors

The estate now runs on a single WordPress platform, with each brand keeping its own personality on top of it:

• Your Space — the main site, with a club finder covering all ten sites, classes, the swim academy and the gymnastics academy.
• Barnsley Metrodome — waterpark, Adventure Reef, health and fitness, events and venue hire, and a what’s-on that changes constantly.
• BPL Golf — the golf side, with its own audience and its own tone.
• Let’s Get Going — the community activity brand.
• BPL — the corporate and charitable side of the organisation.
• A member portal, where members handle their own account rather than ringing a club.

Fix something once and every site gets the fix. A new club, a new brand or a new campaign launches from what already exists rather than from nothing.

Built them a streaming platform

Then there’s Your Space at Home, which isn’t a website at all. It’s a custom application we built so members can take their favourite classes without going anywhere.

Live classes and an on-demand library that the instructors add to every week, a free seven-day trial, subscriptions, and playback that works on a phone, a tablet, a laptop or thrown up on a smart TV. The same instructors people already know from the clubs, in their front room.

Results

• More than 1.5 million visits a year across the estate, on one platform instead of four providers.
• 872,000 visits a year to the main Your Space site.
• 544,000 visits a year to Barnsley Metrodome.
• 106,000 visits a year through the member portal, all self-serve, none of it ringing a club.
• 22,000 visits a year to Your Space at Home.
• The per-club websites, and the fragmented analytics behind them, are gone.