WordPress And Charleswood Karate

Shotokan Karate in Winnipeg

Shotokan Karate in Winnipeg

 

Contact: Ron Porath (Head Instructor/Owner)

Charleswood Karate is a Shotokan Karate club operating in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada since 1993.

With a variety of classes designed to meet the needs of both recreational and competitive martial artists from the ages of 4 and beyond, Charleswood Karate has recently expanded to include Women’s Karate classes and Yoga.

Launched/Expanded: December 2011

 

 

Charleswood Karate Online

Charleswood Karate is an active, popular martial arts club in Winnipeg, Manitoba that was started back in 1993 by Ron Porath, who is now a 6th Dan in Shotokan Karate.  Its training schedule offers more than 16 classes per week, with both general and specialized activities for kids and adults, beginner and advanced.

With an existing website that shared club information, class schedule and club updates via a WordPress blog that had nearly 100 subscribers, Charleswood was already able to get the basic messages across to its membership through the Internet.

Challenge: 

The club’s website was great for providing information to both the public and active members of the club, but being half flat HTML and half WordPress-driven, half of the site was technical, tedious and time-consuming to update. Some pages had long been left with outdated information, and new pages weren’t easy to add and link to within the site itself.

Solution: 

Upgrade the site so it’s using the WordPress content management system to manage the entire thing, and add some features to better manage the content the club was posting (photos in particular).

How WebGrrl Enterprises Helped Out

Using WordPress For Pages And Photos

As a first step towards a larger goal, Jill from Enterprises selected a clean, photo-friendly WordPress website template, then used it to reproduce the existing site’s navigational structure,  page and post content.  The WordPress addon NextGen Gallery was installed to help organize the photographic content, and links and documents were all re-coded to refer to the newly upgraded site.

Once the existing site’s content was transferred into the new template design, a Photo Gallery section was added to hilight the existing pictures, and new photo content that hadn’t been shared with the membership was uploaded as well.

Ongoing Content Production & Coaching

Now that the website can be modified by using one consistent interface, and a new Social Media network is available to Charleswood Karate to spread the word of their events and happenings, Jill from WebGrrl Enterprises is working with Ron Porath and members of Charleswood Karate club to coordinate the gathering, production, publishing and Search Engine Optimization of media content for the club.

Future initiatives will use the current platforms to expand the way Charleswood Karate provides information to its membership and to the public at large, and allow great instructors like 6th Dan Ron Porath a chance to teach students both near and far.

You can see the ongoing project in its current phases by visiting CharleswoodKarate.com or by visiting their Facebook page, Twitter account or YouTube channel.

Results Of Growing The Social Media Network

Charleswood Karate is seeing some immediate results with their website upgrade, photo gallery additions and online Social Media profiles.  Here’s a playlist of videos where we’ve taken a tour through their back-end stats for YouTube, Facebook, their website, and more.