Rebuilding Ballistic: from the Wix website to where it is now

I started this because I wanted to get Ballistic’s website ready for winter. We already had a website on Wix, but parts of it were outdated, the About page still had an old 3D interior, and I wanted to rethink pretty much everything: the way the place looked online, the information people were getting, and how they actually booked a round.

There wasn’t a marketing budget to throw at it. The website needed to make better use of what we already had: the actual rooms, the actual space, and the reasons someone would come here.

August 30: starting with what we had

At first, I was pretty fixated on keeping Wix. We had recently renewed a three-year subscription. Walking away from something we had already paid for wasn’t an obvious first choice.

So the early work was a visual prototype, with the idea that we would figure out how to rebuild it in Wix. I liked the new direction immediately. It gave the rooms more presence and made the site feel much more intentional.

But liking the design opened up a lot of other questions. Should the visual identity lead with “Ballistic,” or keep the full “Ballistic Indoor Golf” name? What should happen to the logo? How far could I change the website without disconnecting it from the place people would actually arrive at?

The storefront was a real constraint. I had designed the original logo around a golf ball rocketing into the sky, with the uppercase T also working as a tee. We weren’t replacing the signage, so any simplification needed to stay recognizably connected to it. A completely different logo wouldn’t solve that.

I also liked the idea of escaping winter through indoor golf. Some of the menu explorations had that feeling, and I wanted to bring it into the website. But those concepts were references for the direction. They weren’t automatically homepage assets.

When generated campaign imagery started making its way into the prototype, I pushed back. The venue photography needed to show the real place. There is room for illustration in explaining something, but the rooms themselves shouldn’t be imaginary.

August 31: deciding to build our own site

The next day, the direction changed: we were going to build our own website instead of continuing with Wix.

That decision didn’t mean everything moved at once. I wanted to finish the redesign before getting into the domain and business-email changes. The first job was to make the site worth moving to.

The homepage went through another pass around its order and emphasis: introduce the place, explain the spaces and groups, make pricing understandable, show what the experience offers, and give people the rules and visit information they need.

The visual language developed around navy, warm cream, orange, and muted green. I specifically didn’t want straight red as the main action colour because it could read as a warning. The current typography pairs DM Sans with Instrument Serif accents. The large headlines and photography gave the site its character, while the supporting text still had to be readable.

The winter idea also became more specific. I supplied the headline “The golf season doesn’t have to end in winter,” with “Book a Round” as the primary action and “See the Space” as the secondary one. The secondary action was meant to help someone understand the venue without pulling them out of that decision.

Giving the site actual destinations

One thing I didn’t want was a navigation bar that only jumped down the homepage. Those links could be useful as a table of contents, but the site needed actual pages.

Food & Drinks, booking, information about the business, and house rules all had their own jobs. Trying to put everything on one long page made it harder to give each subject enough attention.

The architecture kept changing as the content developed. Spaces and pricing eventually came together into one destination, so people could compare the kind of space with what they needed to know about booking it. The main navigation now concentrates on Spaces & Pricing, Food & Drinks, House Rules, Contact, and booking.

I also wanted organic traffic, but the useful material was already in the questions people ask before visiting. How do I book? What do I bring? What happens when I arrive? Those became a better foundation for the guides than filling a blog with general golf advice.

September 3–7: connecting the website to BayFlow

The website’s launch history starts on September 3. The booking connection went through several changes that same day: embedding BayFlow, changing where the buttons led, fixing the embed loading, simplifying the booking page, and removing the extra frame around it.

The earlier site work had kept the existing Microsoft booking link in place. BayFlow became the booking system connected to the new site, with the visual style brought closer to Ballistic’s.

This part had more to it than adding a button. The booking experience needed to account for time, space, group size, and which rooms worked for the people coming. Early discussions explored connected-room bookings for larger groups. The current public flow is narrower: online bookings are for up to four guests, everyone entering counts, and it asks whether anyone plays left-handed before recommending suitable spaces.

There were also practical embed problems to resolve, including resizing the booking content and making the confirmation visible. By September 7, the website’s booking route had been changed to redirect to the calendar. Today, “Book a Round” takes people into Ballistic’s booking experience on its booking subdomain.

BayFlow has its own development history beyond this. For the website, the significant change was that the customer’s next step became part of the work I was designing, rather than just a link to the old booking service.

September 4–7: making the information usable

Once the structure existed, a lot of the work became more specific.

September had its own private-room offer, so the homepage and pricing information needed to distinguish that offer from the wider venue. The site gained seasonal displays instead of treating every room and rate as available in exactly the same way throughout the year.

Food & Drinks developed into a proper menu page, with food, drinks, and bar sections, descriptions, prices, dietary labels, and clearer beer categories. There were repeated layout passes: how much space to give the featured dishes, how the lists should align, and how the page should work on a phone.

The contact form also became functional work. Email delivery was added through Resend, with delivery failures handled in the interface. Lead tracking was tied to the form reporting successful delivery. A button click by itself wasn’t enough to say that someone’s message had reached us.

Alongside that were less noticeable changes: typography, mobile navigation, footer content, booking links, equipment guidance, and wording around outside food and alcohol. They were small changes individually, but they affected what people would understand before walking in.

September 9–11: checking the whole visit

Reviewing the pages together exposed things that weren’t obvious when working on them separately.

The clearest example was session timing. One page described the scheduled booking time, another explained the room timer, and another suggested people could keep playing. Those statements needed to agree.

The terms were corrected to explain that the timer starts when the first person enters the room or bay, with a one-hour minimum and 15-minute increments after that. The bill follows the session timer. Staying longer needs staff confirmation and availability. That explanation also had to make sense in the arrival guidance and on the spaces page.

Equipment information needed the same care. People need to bring their own clubs. The golf-ball guidance has a space-specific exception for auto tee-up. Clean indoor shoes matter because debris can interfere with readings. If something isn’t registering, the useful instruction is to tell staff, rather than leave someone trying to fix the equipment themselves.

The homepage became more useful before arrival, too. It now puts clubs, clean indoor shoes, and the entrance on 30 Ave NE directly below the hero. The guides follow the sequence of booking, preparing to come, and arriving.

The main headline also moved from winter-specific wording to “Your round. Any time of year.” The seasonal offer could then sit beside the booking action without making the whole site sound limited to winter.

Search visibility and the weight of the site

The search work included descriptive page information, business details, a sitemap, and redirects for old entry points. Replacing the Wix site didn’t mean the old links would stop existing, so the old booking and policy addresses needed somewhere appropriate to go.

The images needed attention as well. The site used large original photographs, and on September 11 the implementation added smaller responsive image versions in modern formats, along with locally hosted fonts. That let the design keep its photography while giving browsers more appropriate files to load.

I don’t have a measured traffic or conversion result to attach to those changes. The implementation is there; an improvement in the business needs its own evidence.

Where it is now

As of September 27, Ballistic has a live custom website with its own visual identity, real venue photography, spaces and pricing information, a food and drinks menu, house rules, contact, and practical visit guides. The booking handoff opens BayFlow’s public flow, where guests choose their day and time, enter their group details, and see suitable availability.

There is still a distinction between the live site and the latest local work. The local version includes further button, contrast, navigation, and decorative-arrow cleanup. Some of that cleanup is not reflected on the live homepage yet.

There are unfinished details, too. The live spaces page still has a Room 5 photo placeholder. Seasonal information appears after the page becomes interactive, while the initial page response uses generic availability wording. And checking that the booking page opens is different from checking a complete booking, confirmation, and cancellation journey.

What started with the Wix website has become a much more connected piece of the business: how people understand the venue, choose a space, book, prepare, and know what happens when they get here. The design work has kept moving between the visual identity and those very practical details. Both are part of the site.