How I rebuilt a dance studio’s website around parents
The old DXNY website served families who already knew the studio. I rebuilt the path for parents choosing a class, starting with their child’s age and the questions they needed answered.
Most families who arrived at the old DXNY website already knew the studio. I rebuilt the path for parents choosing a class, starting with their child’s age and the questions they needed answered.
I do the marketing and web strategy for Dance Xtreme New York, a dance studio in Hauppauge, Long Island that everyone calls DXNY. Last spring I moved their site off Squarespace and rebuilt it around a marketing problem: how does a parent who does not know the studio find the right class for their child?
New parents care first about their own child. Age helps them find suitable classes before they start exploring dance styles. Then they need the practical details that make a new place feel possible: a waiting room, ample parking, highway access, and six classrooms in a 10,000-square-foot facility.
The old site did not make that path easy. My decision was to organize the experience around the parent’s questions, not just around the studio’s pages or the platform it was built on.
The Old Site Was on Borrowed Time
The four-day deadline was real, but it was supporting context, not the marketing problem. We'd let the DXNY Squarespace account lapse at the end of March, and the grace period ran out April 13. I wrote the project brief on April 9. We soft-launched the new site on April 12.
Four days. I don't recommend doing it that way... but I'll admit the deadline did something useful. There was no room to debate fonts for three weeks. Every decision came down to whether it helped a parent find a class, see a price, understand the visit, or sign their kid up.
One thing we deliberately did NOT do was rebrand. This was the website rebuild, not the earlier 2016 Dance Xtreme branding project. The crown logo, the colors, the "Rise & Reign" tagline, and the existing identity carried straight over. Families already knew the brand and loved it... the rebuild was about the experience underneath it.
What Parents Couldn't Do on the Old Site
When I audited the old site before the rebuild, the problems weren't cosmetic. They were things an actual parent would hit:
- The class schedule was dense tables with seasonal content mixed together. Hard to read on a desktop, brutal on a phone.
- Registration was a dead end. The "Parent Portal" button dumped you onto a third-party system with no explanation of what it was or what to do there.
- Pricing, schedule, and programs lived on disconnected pages... so answering "what would this cost for my 6-year-old" meant a scavenger hunt.
- The path did not bring practical questions forward. Parents needed to picture the visit, including the waiting room, parking, highway access, and the six-classroom facility.
- The About page had no instructor bios or photos. Parents are trusting these people with their kids. They want to see faces.
- Popups and dense tables everywhere on mobile, which is where most parents actually are.
None of this was Squarespace's fault, exactly. Some of it was template limits, some of it was years of content piling up. Either way, a parent who couldn't find an answer wasn't going to dig for it.
I Rebuilt It for a Parent at 9pm on Their Phone
That was the whole design brief. A tired parent, on the couch, phone in hand, trying to figure out if dance fits their kid's life. Start with the child's age, find suitable classes, then explore styles and everything else.
The schedule page now. Start with age, then read straight down the day... style, time, age range, and who is teaching it, on one line each.
Every feature had to serve that person:
- Start with age. Find suitable classes first, then explore dance styles, schedules, and programs. The order matters because the parent is choosing for one child, not browsing a catalog.
- A schedule you can actually read. Season toggle, calendar view, filterable by age and style. The single biggest complaint about the old site, fixed first.
- A clear path for two kinds of parents. Some arrive thinking "fun weekly class," some arrive thinking "competition team." The site meets both at the door and walks each one down their own path, from Mommy & Me on up.
- Practical details in the decision. A waiting room, ample parking, highway access, and six classrooms in a 10,000-square-foot facility help a new family picture what the visit will be like.
- Real checkout. The old store had three master class tickets and "in-store pickup only." Now it runs on Stripe... pick the class, pay on your phone, done.
- Faces. Instructor bios with photos, and real parent testimonials on the homepage. One mom wrote that the teachers are "top notch, loving and passionate." That does more selling than any copy I could write.
What the Traffic Chart Shows
The chart shows 916 sessions in January and 5,337 in July. Those are real GA4 totals, but they are not a clean before-and-after test. January through March were before the rebuild. The new site soft-launched on April 12, so April contains both the old-site period and the rebuilt-site period. May through July were after launch.
+ SHOW THE NUMBERS− HIDE THE NUMBERS
| MONTH | SESSIONS | SITE |
|---|---|---|
| January 2026 | 916 | Old |
| February 2026 | 1,209 | Old |
| March 2026 | 1,495 | Old |
| April 2026 | 1,628 | Rebuilt |
| May 2026 | 1,817 | Rebuilt |
| June 2026 | 2,493 | Rebuilt |
| July 2026 | 5,337 | Rebuilt |
I want to be careful with the claim here, because I hate inflated case studies. The chart shows traffic was higher in July than in January, and the monthly totals increased across the period shown. It does not prove the redesign caused that increase. April is a mixed month, and other things can affect traffic over time.
There was zero ad spend behind the traffic shown here, but that still does not turn the chart into a controlled test. The rebuild was intended to give parents a clearer path to a class. The chart gives context for the period around that work, not proof that the redesign alone produced the July number.
Real talk: DXNY is a client, and I run their marketing and web strategy. The numbers come from their Google Analytics. I am sharing the work and the available context, not claiming a level of certainty the chart cannot support.
Questions I Keep Getting From Other Business Owners
Should I move my business website off Squarespace?
Not automatically. If the template fits how you work and you're not fighting it, stay. I spent a decade on Squarespace myself before leaving. The honest test: if you keep shrinking your ideas down to what the template allows, that's the signal to start looking.
Will redesigning my website hurt my Google rankings?
It can, if you're careless... changing every URL with no redirects is the classic self-inflicted wound. In DXNY's case, the chart shows higher traffic totals after the April launch, but it cannot tell us that the redesign caused the difference. Treat your existing pages and URLs as assets you're moving, not junk you're throwing out, and a redesign becomes an upgrade instead of a reset.
How long until a new website shows SEO results?
Think in months, not weeks. The DXNY chart covers January through July and includes a mixed launch month, so it cannot promise an SEO timeline or isolate what caused the change. Pages that answer real questions need time to do their job. If you need results next week, a redesign is the wrong tool... that's what ads are for.
Do I need a blog on my small business website?
For a local business I'd say yes, and DXNY convinced me. Parents don't search for your studio's name until they already know you exist. They search their questions... what age to start dance, what to expect at a first competition. A blog is how your site shows up in those moments.
If Your Site Has the Same Problems
If your site makes customers work too hard to choose, find an answer, or take the next step... that's fixable, and it doesn't have to take months.
I take on this kind of work. Get in touch if you want to talk through a similar business problem.
If you want the platform decision behind this rebuild, read Why I left Squarespace and what I create with now. You’ll get the story of why I left Squarespace, what its fees and limitations were costing me, and what I build with now.
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