BUILT BY
DANCERS.

Hi — I'm Steve Farnworth, the person behind DanceHow.

This started with a personal problem. I wanted to learn to dance, properly. Not a one-off taster, not a corporate Zumba clone, not a YouTube tutorial I'd never repeat. An actual local class, taught by a teacher who knew what they were doing, that fit my week and matched my level.

Finding one was harder than it should have been. Every studio had its own site, half the timetables were a PDF from 2019, prices were buried two clicks deep, and Google Maps surfaced the same five high-bidders no matter what I searched for. The result: people who'd love dancing never find their way in, and great studios stay invisible to the dancers who'd love them.

I'm a software engineer and a long-time dancer. I had the tools to do something about it. So I started building a directory the way I'd want it to work as a learner — class-level, not just studio-level. Real day, real time, real level, real price. If a studio doesn't publish its schedule, we don't make one up. If a price is unknown, we don't fill it in. If we got something wrong, we fix it the same day a studio tells us.

DanceHow is small and deliberately so. There's no VC, no algorithmic feed, no growth-hacking funnel pretending to be a directory. Just a useful list, maintained carefully, that I'd want to use myself.

— Steve

Where studios come from

For each city we cover we build a seed list from local council business registries, recognised national bodies (BDC, IDTA, ISTD, DanceUSA, etc.), and Google's public Places data. The seed is then deduplicated and manually triaged — moved studios, closed studios and chains that aren't really studios are removed before a single page is published.

Where schedules come from

We fetch each studio's homepage plus the pages most likely to contain class data — typically named timetable, schedule, classes, or book. The text of those pages is parsed against a strict schema asking only for class-level fields (style, level, day, time, length, price, teacher). We deliberately ignore one-off socials, parties, branded programmes and private lessons, because mixing those into a regular schedule misleads beginners.

How we set prices

The headline price on every city and style page is the median drop-in price across the studios we have data for in that area. Term packages, class packs and memberships are excluded because they aren't comparable without normalisation. Sample size is shown prominently next to every figure, and stale prices are flagged rather than silently overwritten. Full pricing methodology →

How fresh the data is

Every studio is on a rolling re-scrape — we revisit each source at least monthly, sooner if a studio reports a change. Each row carries a last seen timestamp so dancers can see exactly when the data was captured. If a studio's site changes layout and we can no longer read it, the row is marked stale rather than replaced with guesswork.

What we don't do

• We don't buy data from third-party aggregators.
• We don't generate fake activity or fake reviews.
• We don't auto-translate listings between languages — local context matters.
• We don't sell visitor data. Privacy policy.