Using Pavilion with the website you already have

Settings → Connect a Website. A great many clubs arrive at Pavilion with a website already — Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Joomla, or something a member’s son-in-law wrote in 2011 — usually on different hosting, and often paid for annually by somebody who has since stood down. You do not have to move it, rebuild it, or give it up. Any answer that starts “first, move your website” is not an answer.

🏠 Where Pavilion lives

Pavilion is WordPress, so it needs somewhere that runs WordPress — which Wix and Squarespace never will. It therefore goes at an address of its own, and for almost every club that should be a subdomain of the name they already own: members.yourclub.co.uk alongside www.yourclub.co.uk.

That takes one DNS record from whoever the club bought its domain name from, and nothing whatsoever from the company hosting the existing site. The alternative — yourclub.co.uk/members/ — needs that host to run PHP and MySQL in a subfolder, which the website builders will not do at all and which elsewhere means somebody editing rewrite rules.

There is a second reason, and it matters more than the first: the two fail separately. If the club website goes down, or the person who maintains it disappears, bookings and subscriptions carry on. That is the right way round.

➡️ Buttons out

Join, Book a Rink, Pay the Club and the members’ app, sitting in your existing menu. The screen builds the block for you with the real addresses already in it, so it can be pasted in exactly as it stands — on Wix and Squarespace, into an Embed or Custom HTML block.

This half is in every package including Basic, deliberately. A club that cannot put a Join button on its own front page cannot use Pavilion at all, whatever it has paid, and charging for the only way in would be a strange way to run a membership system.

⬅️ And information back

From Standard upwards, your fixtures, results, what’s on and how busy the green is can be rendered onto your existing pages — see Fixtures on your own website.

🔒 Two things to get right before you hand the address out

https. Look for the padlock. Members will be typing card numbers into these pages, and a browser warning at that moment is the fastest way there is to lose a subscription payment. Hosts provide the certificate free; it is a five-minute job for them.

The address itself. Settle it before you print anything. Every link, poster, newsletter and QR code from here on will carry it, and changing it afterwards means changing all of them.

🖼 What about putting Pavilion inside the existing page?

Pavilion does not offer this, and the reason is worth stating rather than hiding. An iframe keeps the club’s own header and menu around the outside, which looks tidy — and then breaks signing in, breaks the back button, and is blocked outright by several hosts. It fails for the members least able to work around it, on the screens that matter most. Sending people to a clearly-labelled club address is honest and works everywhere.

Common questions

Do we have to move our website to WordPress?

No, and most clubs should not. Leave it exactly where it is. Pavilion goes on its own subdomain and the two are linked together.

Our website is on Wix / Squarespace / GoDaddy.

All fine. None of them will run Pavilion itself, which is precisely why it lives at its own address — and all of them will happily take the buttons, and the fixture panels, into an Embed or Custom HTML block.

Can we use yourclub.co.uk/members instead of members.yourclub.co.uk?

Only if the same hosting serves both, and it usually does not. The subdomain needs nothing from whoever hosts your existing site, which is what makes it work for nearly everybody.

Members say the address changes when they click Book a Rink.

It does, and that is normal. Say so once in a newsletter. Without that, a handful of members will assume it is a scam and ring the secretary — which is a much bigger problem than the address itself.

Nobody knows who holds our domain name.

Look the name up on a WHOIS service, or find the annual payment on the club’s bank statements. Worth doing before you need it: a club that cannot get into its own domain is one missed renewal away from losing its website and its email on the same day.

A button on our site goes to a “page not found”.

That page has not been made in Pavilion yet. Settings → Your Website will create it; the button then works with no change at your end, because it was always pointing at the right address.