A gym website that sells memberships

Someone looking for a new gym has three questions: how much it costs, what is included and what it looks like inside. Most gym websites answer none of them — the price list is “on request”, there are five photographs, and the timetable is a PDF from last September.

For the concept club Forma we built a site that answers all three before the visitor is halfway down the page.

1. Numbers first, nothing hidden

The first screen has the headline on the left and a dark card on the right with three figures that count up on arrival: 4,800 m² of training space, 120+ classes a week, 19 hours open every day.

These are the numbers competitors bury in the small print or leave out altogether. Put at the very top, they do two things: they tell you the size of the club, and they say you have nothing to hide.

2. Zones as a bento grid, not a list

A large gym has a problem of abundance: it offers so much that a bulleted list cancels all of it out. So we laid the zones out in a bento grid — cards of different sizes, each with its own photograph and a one-line description:

• Main floor — cardio machines with screens, 80 stations
• Strength zone — more than 100 strength machines and more than 50 powerlifting stations
• Spinning arena — 40 bikes, live metrics
• Four studios — aerobics, HIIT, dance, functional training
• Pilates and yoga — reformers, morning classes
• Pools and saunas — 25 m pool, three saunas, ice bath

The cards rearrange themselves as you move down the page and respond subtly to the pointer. The visitor takes in the whole offer at a glance — clearly, quickly and without reading a word more than necessary.

3. A price list you can understand in five seconds

This is where most sign-ups are won or lost. Instead of a table with ten rows we built three packages and one switch:

• GYM — main floor and free weights: €39 / €33 a month
• GYM + STUDIO — all classes, spinning, pilates and yoga: €54 / €46
• ALL-IN — everything above plus pools, saunas and the ice bath: €69 / €59

The switch flips between a 6-month and a 12-month membership, and the prices count down in an animation. The saving is not written in the small print — you see it as movement in the number. The middle package is marked as the most popular and set on a dark background, because most people pick the middle option if you show it to them.

4. The timetable should move

A band runs across the full width with classes and times: 06:00 morning yoga, 07:30 spinning, 12:15 express HIIT, 17:00 reformer pilates, 18:30 bodypump, 20:00 stretching. It scrolls continuously and gives the feeling that something is always happening at the club — which, for a gym, is exactly the message you want.

5. The gallery needs people in it, not only equipment

This is the difference between an equipment catalogue and a club you want to go to. The gallery at the foot of the page holds twenty photographs in a mosaic layout: a squat in the rack, a treadmill run by the window at dusk, a spinning class in red light, yoga in the morning sun, rowing, the changing rooms, the juice bar, the recovery corner, the underwater lights of the pool.

Roughly half the photographs should have people in them. An empty gym looks like a closing-down sale; a full one looks like a community.

What we need from the club

1. A photo shoot — half a day with a photographer who can work in poor light. Members have to be in the shots too (with written consent to publish).
2. An accurate price list — every variant, including discounts for school pupils, students and pensioners.
3. The class timetable — in a spreadsheet, not as an image.
4. The club’s figures — floor area, number of machines, opening hours.

What comes after the website

The next logical step for a large club is not a prettier site but a class booking system — and that already belongs to web apps. Booking a class, a waiting list, cancellation up to two hours before, a record of attendance. We build those too, but we recommend sorting out the brochure site and the price list first; most clubs see a noticeable rise in enquiries from that alone.