Signing up without having to write an email first

Skill Academy Basket runs basketball camps, overnight camps and tournaments for children and teenagers in Borken, along with after-school clubs. There was a website, built with Webflow. It had aged badly, and it brought in almost no sign-ups.

The problem was less the look than the path. Every button labelled Register led to the contact section at the bottom of the page, which asked visitors to send an email. There was no form. Parents had to work out for themselves what a sign-up needed to include. A page that invites people to sign up and then opens their email program puts the step where most of them drop out exactly between deciding and signing up.

Every event has its own page, and that page answers the questions that come before a sign-up: dates, venue with address, age group, price for club members and non-members, what the price includes, the daily schedule, who leads as head coach and what parents should know about supervision and safety. A status shows whether places are still free, running low or down to a waiting list.

Signing up is a form rather than an email. Anyone who clicks sign up on an event page lands in the form with that event and the type of request already selected. It asks for what the organisers actually need: whether a parent or an adult player is signing up, the age group and contact details.

After a short overview, the homepage leads straight to the event list, which can be filtered by type of event. Past events move to an archive, so the list only shows what people can still sign up for.

A camp is a decision with a date and a limited number of places. Someone who finds a camp for their child in the evening and first has to compose an email puts it off until tomorrow, and by tomorrow the camp may be full or the decision forgotten. That is why the length of the path from event page to submitted sign-up weighs more here than any design detail.

Since the relaunch, course sign-ups have grown fivefold. The count includes every sign-up, not only those through the form, so it also covers the ones that arrive some other way. That makes the figure more robust than form statistics alone, which would leave out every email and every phone call.

It is still not a lab result. The same period also covers the season's programme, word of mouth and the coaches' work in the gym. Adding a form does not automatically multiply anyone's sign-ups by five. What can be said is this: before, the website brought in almost no sign-ups, and the cause was a path that no longer exists.