Barerooms Website
Web maintenance on this new gym with bookable rooms
Background of Barerooms
Cool, innovative, fun...but enough about me, let's talk Barerooms
Barerooms was an idea formed during the COVID-19 lockdown. With the gyms closed, people were forced to exercise at home which was difficult for most. As the UK exited lockdown, Barerooms came to fruition solving some of the problems with a normal gym.
Unable to access equipment because someone else is using it
Self conscious of people looking at you
Embarrassed of your figure because of weight gain or not as strong as other members
Don't know what training to do
Barerooms solves the issue by splitting the gym into separate bookable rooms with all the equipment you'll need to train.
It'd be more accurate to call Barerooms an activity centre as it hosts other recreational rooms like a Golf Simulator, flexi room and a VR stations (can run on the spot while playing VR). A cool idea that's been open since February 2022.
My Involvement
So off the bat, I did not build the initial website. The first website was built in WordPress and was...slow. Taking a grand total of 8 seconds to fully load. The branding was also messy to begin with as the original website had magenta as its primary colour while the social media pages used yellow.
I began by advising (when asked) to have the website remade in Nuxt.js, which drastically improved the performance taking 1.5/2 seconds to load from the original 8s. With it being remade in Nuxt by another developer off Fiverr, I was able to deploy it using Netlify and could do continuous improvements and other web maintenance.
I continued to improve the sites performance with it now taking just over a second to load. I also changed to the colours to yellow to match Bareroom's social media and provide a more consistent brand. There are several other changes made like adding new memberships, new deals made available and other UI updates to improve the site.
One issue that arose was regarding the bandwidth used on Netlify. Some new, high quality images were added to the site that ate up the 100GB Netlify's monthly free tier provided. To fix this I set Barerooms with an AWS account and created an S3 bucket to host these images.
2023 Update
Barerooms underwent some updates in 2023. Several new rooms were added which included:
PT Pods - Compact training rooms offering all the equipment needed for a workout, ideal for one person.
Boxing Room - Room with training equipment catered to boxing allowing users to improve their technique along with general physique and cardio.
Automated Massage - A massage chair which can be used to alleviate tension and soreness. A great way to use Barerooms when your are unable to train.
Sensory Deprivation - A tank designed for sensory isolation which has multiple health benefits.
Racing Simulator - A gaming setup enabling players to race using a wheel and pedals. I've played on this setup multiple times as it is super fun!
These new additions meant the website needed to be updated and a redesign would be ideal. The landing page was mostly redesigned by the founder using canva, giving me a rough idea of what he wanted and I then updated the page accordingly.
The membership page was just a page with 5 images. I redesigned the page using the brand colours to display each membership tier and the key features they offered. The main membership that suited both the users and the business was the Gold. This offered 3 hours a week for £25.00 a month. So I made a point to have the Gold standout by flipping its colors. In addition, I added a table beneath the main section detailing what each membership offers. This helped to show how much Barerooms had to offer which made the founder very happy with this addition.
The remaining pages detailed the rooms available and the days passes which could be purchased. Upon meeting with the founder, we discussed and designed an ideal way to display this information on the website. Upon gaining all the images for each room, I used ChatGPT to generate a description for each room and deployed the new redesigned website.
Some other additions I added were a page transition which faded each page in and the navbar now highlighted the nav link for the current page. I also added Barerooms' opening times to the footer as it was a frequently asked question since it was not already on the website.
The Barerooms website looks and works much better now, being more on brand, responsive and informative than before.
Future plans
Currently Barerooms uses a third party booking system, but we'd like to develop an app with an internal booking system among other features. I'd like to remake the main website from scratch myself to integrate it with this app as well.
At the time of writing this, Barerooms only has one site open with plans to add more across country once the first site reaches enough members. The first site is working very well with multiple happy members, positive reviews and is my go to place for a workout.