Cruden Bay

We left Royal Dornoch the next morning for the 4 hour or so drive south to Cruden Bay.  We passed through the town of Nairn and got a glimpse of the Nairn course.  We had hoped to play Nairn, but a member-guest tournament kept us from playing. 

I had few preconcieved notions about Cruden Bay other than hearing it was this funky course with a cult-like appeal. The designer is the same as Irelands’ famed Ballybunion, so I thought I might be in for a pleasant suprise.  I was not disappointed.

This course had some of the greatest holes I played on the trip (and some of the worst).  The sand dunes were larger than just about anywhere else and the routing was tremendous.  I’m not a big fan of blind shots, and there were 4 holes in a row that had blind shots!  Holes 13-16.

 This course would be on my short-list for any return trip to Scotland.  Don’t miss it

The Customer is always right….

I’ve always struggled with the motto “The Customer is Always Right”, as all of us have dealt with people that there is no way you can please.  Are they always right?  Here is a great article on the subject.

Royal Dornoch

Our first stop, Royal Dornoch (DOR-nick) was a 4 hour car trip from Edinburgh.  The trip went fast as we zipped along mostly 4 lane highways through the rural hillsides of Scotland.  My first reaction was that it was hillier than I expected with few towns or trees along the way.  This was the course I was most excited to play as I had read so much about it; where Donald Ross learned his technique and a course fequently rated top 20 in the world. But few have heard about it, mostly because it is so remote and not part of the Open rotation.  The course exceeded my expectations.

I read that the sign of a great course is how many holes can you remember after you’ve played it.  It’s been 6 months and I can still visualize completely about 8 holes.  The font 9 has two of the greatest par 3′s I’ve ever played and the 2nd hole has been said to have the most difficult 2nd shot in golf!  And on a par three!

I hit the ball well on the front, but major jet lag and some bad club selection left me with a bad score but that didn’t affect my impression of the course.  The condition was what I expected; greens relatively slow in pace but true and the fairways in decent condition.  The rough was much less penal that I envisioned and lots of rain made for a soft, green course.  I hit a few balls in the rough and had no problem finding them.  In fact I lost only one ball the entire trip.

The back nine continued with an array of great holes. A surprise was that our 3-some never waited a shot and we saw only a handful of golfers on the course.  The greens (and this applied to all the courses) were much bigger than I expected. We also never saw a golf cart as everyone was either carrying their clubs or using a pull cart. The way the game is meant to be played.  When we finished it was all I could do not to race to the first tee for another go.   Royal Dornoch is a must see despite its remote location.

We spent the night in the Dornoch Castle Hotel.  The service was excellent with clean rooms and lounge/cafe on the main floor.  There aren’t many choices in this small village, but this more than suited or needs.

6 Months Off

Waiting 6 months to post on your blog is not a recipe for success, but that was never the intention.  But after a trip to Scotland over the summer, I wanted to put my thoughts down before it was too late.  To put it bluntly, the trip exceeded all my expectations and I plan to write a short post about each course. 

We played 5 courses; Royal Dornoch, Cruden Bay, Royal Aberdeen, North Berwick and Guillon #2.  We also walked two open venue sites; Carnoustie and St. Andrews.

RSS

How many sites do you check everyday for news?  With so many news sites, blogs and the like it’s impossible to stay up with everything.  That’s where RSS steps in.  It’s a great way for you to “subscribe” to the sites you want and then they push the news to you rather than you checking to see what’s new. We publish an RSS feed for the Minnesota Section PGA and there are many other golf related RSS feeds (PGA for example).

For a great beginner’s explanation, watch this video
To find RSS feeds check out Feedster

Once you start using  RSS you will be amazed at how much you can stay up with. I personally use Google Reader but there are many other sites that let you organize your RSS feeds including Internet Explorer 7.

The Most Important Thing-Quality Photos

I’m working with a new golf client right now and we got to talking about the initial design elements for his site. I’m a firm believer that navigation is critical, so we began with that.  But I started thinking about if there was a “most important thing” for a good golf site.  And I think there is and that would be “quality photos”.  Photo galleries are almost always one of the most viewed pages and professionally taken photos can make silk out of pig’s ear.  Bad photos, and you’re better off with none.  Here’s a couple of sites that I think figured it out. 

• Bay Harbor
• Barnbougle Dunes
• Seven Canyons

I’m sure you’ll agree that the first thing you notice on these sites is the terrific photos.  So my advice is make sure your site has lots of great photos.  It will definitely have an impact.

Video on your Golf Website

No question, video is the next big thing for golf websites.  But just like adding photos to your site, it has to be done right.  I think Seven Canyons is doing a great job.  My only suggestion is the video should not start automatically.  The photos and video definitely make me want to visit this place!

If you’re going to add video, make sure it streams so users don’t have to wait for the entire video to download.  Flash is the most popular method and is easy to add to your site.  You can also embed YouTube videos, though they won’t look as professional.

Attracting Visitors Part II

We’ve gone over a few pointers on how to increase your ranking and therefore traffic from search engines.  Now I would like to talk about keywords.

When someone types into Google “St. Paul Golf”, those sites that include those keywords will come to the top.  And when search engines rank the keywords in your site, they place the most value:
1)  On the home page
2)  The higher up in the page they appear
3)  Whether they are bold or in a larger font
4)  If they are included in the title of your page
5)  If they are part of your domain name (www.stpaulgolf.com for example)

So it’s important to include your keywords on your home page and try to include them as high on the page as possible. Many sites like to include just a photo with little or no text on their home page.  They feel this gives a sense of professionalism or class to the club.  But this dramatically hurts your ranking. You’ve lost your best chance to gain viewers through search. Here is an example of a site with NO text on the home page.

So when creating the most important page of your site, the home page, remember to keep both your viewers and search engines in mind.  No other page can bring you more viewers or keep them away then a poorly thought out home page.  And you should carefully think about the keywords you want to rank highly. For a tool that shows you the popularity of search words, check out this site.

There is another tag, unseen by viewers, called a keywords meta tag.  This would normally include words you want to be searched for.  Because of abuse by some websites, this meta tag is no longer used by most major search engines.  I no longer even include the tag.

Golf Course Blogs

I’ve wondered if any club has been using blogs successfully as a way to communicate with their members.  Now I think I have the answer as Northland CC has a great blog. Some items just don’t seem like they fit in an email or on your website. One unique and positive aspect of blogs as that people can post comments that everyone can see.  You can’t do that with email or your website as easily.

Attracting Visitors

There are many ways to attract visitors to your site but none may be more important than using good SEO (search engine optimization) techniques.  Search engines, and Google specifically, will always be your main source of getting new viewers.

We already touched on why you should not use graphics as a way of displaying text.  Search engines cannot ready graphics.  There are many others and here are a couple:
   Content:  Nothing is more important than well written, current, changing and lots of  content. If you are trying to improve your outside outings business, make sure you have a separate page for outings AND talk about that on your home page.  SE’s (search engines) give more priority to what is on your home page so don’t just put a link to your outings page; discuss it on your home page.
  Outbound links:  Make sure you have lots of links within your site linking to other pages within your site. If you think another page within your site is important, then SE’s will too.  And it’s not a bad thing to have links to other sites.  Though this will improve your SEO there is also the downside of sending users to another site.
  Inbound links: This is one of the most important and what made Google what it is today.  If other sites link to you then you must be a site that is of value.  Google calls it “page rank” and the higher your page rank the higher your SERP (search engine ranking position) .  You can find out your page rank by going to this site: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-lookup/  A page rank of 3 is  good.  4 is very good and 5 is terrific.

In a later post we’ll talk about some other ways to improve your site for search engines.