Accelerate Rugby Training
Accelerate Rugby was founded by Duncan Hodge — former Scotland international rugby player and coach, whose career has taken him from the international stage to coaching athletes and young players across the world. The business runs specialist holiday camps across Easter, summer and October breaks, with a growing range of skill-specific programmes that have developed considerably since the website was first built.
That evolution was part of what brought the project to us. The website had been built to reflect an earlier version of the business, and the gap between what Accelerate Rugby had become and what the site was communicating had grown to a point where it was affecting how the business performed online.
Where we started
The initial scope was a platform migration — moving the existing site from an older version of Squarespace to the current fluid engine — alongside a migration of the mailing list from Mailchimp into Squarespace's built-in email campaigns. The mailing list numbers and content requirements made the move practical, and Squarespace's segmentation and tagging capabilities were sufficient to meet the business's needs, with further improvements expected as the platform continues to develop.
All existing mailing lists were carried over intact, with segmentation preserved throughout. New email templates were designed with more dynamic layouts and modular sections that Duncan and the team could switch in and out depending on what a given campaign required — reducing the time spent building emails from scratch each time.
Automation flows were built to handle the communications that had previously required manual attention: onboarding sequences for new sign-ups, follow-up flows for waiting lists and prompts for last-minute spaces in camps, targeted to the right geographic segments automatically. The goal was to reduce the operational time being spent on email marketing without reducing the quality or relevance of what was landing in people's inboxes.
Words from the client
“I recently did some work with Studio Creates (and will again) and fair to say I was well out of my comfort zone throughout! However, Sarah from start to end of project was excellent. Nothing was too much trouble, was highly organised and provided real expertise and added real value to my business. Would highly recommend.”
The bigger picture
Once the migration and email work was underway, it became clear that the website itself needed more than a refresh. The information architecture hadn't kept pace with how the business had developed, and the structure was no longer serving either the visitor experience or the commercial objectives of the business effectively.
The full overhaul followed. Navigation was restructured from the ground up, beginning with a proper look at the business's current services, camp categories and specialist skill sets. The new structure was designed to do two things simultaneously: showcase Duncan Hodge's expertise, playing history and coaching career clearly for first-time visitors, and make it significantly easier for returning families — signing their children up for camps season after season — to find and book the specific programmes they were looking for.
A significant amount of content was rewritten across the site. Hero video footage was refreshed to reflect current kit and a more current visual identity for the business. Imagery was updated throughout. The scheduling system was also refined to allow courses to be swapped in and out at different points in the year without requiring bespoke code to be rebuilt each time — giving Duncan and the team far greater independence in managing seasonal changes going forward.
SEO and AI search
The SEO work went beyond the basics. All pages — new and retained — were optimised geographically, with image file sizes reduced for faster loading and alt tags updated for both accessibility and search visibility.
FAQs were added to each of the service pages with a specific purpose in mind: optimising for the AI-generated search results and large language model responses that increasingly appear above traditional search listings. As more people ask conversational questions and receive AI-generated answers rather than clicking through to results, having well-structured FAQ content on individual service pages gives those pages a meaningful advantage in how they're surfaced and cited.
Tutorial videos were produced post-launch to give the team the confidence and capability to manage and update the site independently — keeping content current without requiring ongoing developer support.
Early results
Camp booking numbers improved this year following the overhaul. A full picture of the impact across the complete annual cycle of camps will become clearer as twelve months of post-launch data accumulates, particularly in relation to the SEO and traffic improvements.
For a business where seasonal camp sign-ups are the primary commercial activity, a website and email system that makes the booking journey clearer and the marketing more automated is a practical improvement as much as a visual one. Both matter — and both were addressed
Do you have an existing Squarespace website and functionality which needs a refresh? We can help.
