This is the build we would run for an RYA, ASA or club-run sailing school moving off PDFs and email enrolment: the exact feature set, a 10-week timeline, what each tier costs, and the numbers we measure after launch. It is a documented plan, not a report of a past client's figures.
Most sailing schools publish a course list as a PDF, take enrolments by email, and reconcile who is actually booked in a spreadsheet. Parents wait a day for an answer about a youth week, waivers get signed on the pontoon, and nobody sees a half-empty cohort until it has to be cancelled.
One system that owns courses, seats and payment — then a site designed so a parent can finish an enrolment on a phone in one sitting. Office tooling ships with it, because a booking system your staff work around is just a prettier PDF.
We map every course you run: levels, certification body, prerequisites, minimum and maximum group sizes, instructor ratios, seasons and pricing. Output is a course-and-enrolment spec the build is measured against.
Wireframes then full design for the course catalogue, individual course pages, and the enrolment checkout. Parents booking a youth course on a phone are the design constraint — every extra field has to justify itself.
Course scheduling with seats and waitlists, deposit and balance payments, digital waivers and medical forms, instructor assignment and the school dashboard. Weekly demo builds so your team sees real enrolments flow through early.
Course-level and location landing pages, structured data, review integration, email automations and calendar sync. Existing student and course data is migrated here.
Full enrolment-path testing including edge cases: overbooked cohorts, refunds, partial payments, weather cancellations, under-18 consent. Staff training, cutover plan, then launch with monitoring.
We watch the enrolment funnel and fix the biggest drop-off each month, alongside search work on course and location pages to fill shoulder-season cohorts.
The same six moments in a student's enrolment, run the old way and run on the new site.
A PDF course list and a table of dates that goes stale mid-season.
Filterable catalogue by level, date and venue with live seats remaining.
Enquiry email, then a manual check of who is already booked.
Seats shown in real time; the student books without waiting for a reply.
Bank transfer chased by hand, often days after the decision.
Deposit paid at enrolment, balance auto-requested before the course.
Waivers and medical forms printed and signed on the pontoon.
Digital waivers and consent captured before arrival, stored per student.
Cancelled cohorts announced late; waitlists live in someone's inbox.
Waitlists auto-promote and low-fill cohorts flag early in the dashboard.
One page for all courses, invisible for level and location searches.
Course-level and location pages with Course and Event structured data.
Budget decides how much of enrolment gets automated. These are the same ranges quoted on our sailing school website design page, mapped to the operational change each one buys.
$1,500 – $3,000
A small school with a handful of courses and enquiry-based enrolment.
Removes the PDF-and-email loop. The measurable gain is enquiry response time and local search visibility rather than online payment.
Usually justified by a small number of extra enrolments per season.
$3,000 – $8,000
Multiple course levels, youth programmes and term bookings.
Online booking with deposits, waitlists and automated joining instructions. This is the tier where admin hours per enrolment drop the most.
Measured against saved admin hours plus recovered enquiries that used to go unanswered.
$8,000+
Multi-location academies, national schools and federations.
Certification tracking, instructor portals and multi-location scheduling. Value comes from consistency across centres, not just the website.
Scoped in phases so each release funds the next.
Every baseline below is taken from your own season data in week one. We publish the framework, not invented percentages — the targets are what the build is held to once your numbers are in.
It is a documented blueprint of the build we run, not a report of a past client's numbers. The shipped sailing school work you can review today is Philippine School of Yachting, which includes a custom WordPress theme and a bespoke course booking plugin — it is linked from this page.
Ten weeks from kickoff to launch: two weeks on course architecture, two on enrolment UX, three on scheduling, payments and waivers, one on content and SEO, then two on testing and staff training. Multi-location academies are phased with a first release in roughly twelve weeks.
Start builds run $1,500 to $3,000, Academy builds with online booking and waitlists run $3,000 to $8,000, and multi-location or federation projects start at $8,000 and are quoted in phases. The tier is chosen from your course count and how much of enrolment you want automated.
Yes, from the Academy tier upward. Enrolment takes a deposit at the point of commitment and schedules the balance before the course start date, with family and group options, waitlists and refund handling for weather cancellations.
Waivers, medical declarations and parental consent are captured digitally during enrolment and stored against the student record, so instructors get a clean manifest instead of chasing paper on the pontoon.
Yes, wherever your current system offers an export or an API. Courses, dates, student records and certification history are imported in week eight and verified against the old system before a planned cutover date.
Four numbers agreed in week one against your own baseline: enquiry-to-enrolment time, course fill rate, admin hours per enrolment and organic enquiries. They are reported monthly alongside the biggest funnel drop-off we are fixing next.
Send us your current course list and we'll design a free homepage and course-page concept for your sailing school — no cost, no commitment.
Share your course levels, season structure and how you take enrolments today. We'll return a scoped version of this blueprint with a fixed price range.