Website

City boy turned country

Hi guys,

I have been asked by my rugby club to review and redesign the club website basically because it is crap.

The reason I was asked is that I am a business analyst and I have worked for a software house before.

I was wondering if any of you could give me a few basics of what makes a good website.

I would prefer not to name the website as I believe the previous developer is a member here but I will PM it if needed.

Thanks

CBTC

Deliverance XXV

Find out what they want in the website.
What new features? What didn't work and what did work in the old website.
Do they want to update it themselves? (highly likely)
If so, what technology? Joomla/Wordpress/Custom Built?
Commerce/Online sales functions for kits/souvenirs/tickets etc?

Research other rugby websites and find out what makes them tick. (Please God no splash screens (a la Leinster) please!)
All the rugby provinces have similar styles and structures:
http://www.leinsterrugby.ie
http://www.ulsterrugby.com/
http://www.munsterrugby.ie/
http://www.connachtrugby.ie

Basic features that should be implemented:

Clean structure and modern/visual design.
Include colour scheme of rugby club
Fast loading & easy navigation/accessibility
Solid SEO implementation
Search Functions
Social media integration
Brand identity integration

Eoin

One option is to consider sacrificing having your own design, and using a service that's built for sports clubs like www.pitchero.com to host it instead.

We used to have our own club site that was developed and designed from the ground up, but in the end we switched over to pitchero as it was easier for people to edit content, collaborate etc. It's far from a perfect solution, but it definitely cuts down on a lot of coding/repetitive updates.

off.the.walls

can you put up a link to the old site?

jachim

Hi, maybe you've done something already for this site, but for club websites I highly recommend the Joomla content management system. It has built-in user management, self-edit and self-update capabilities, and it's extremely easy to get started with and use. I've just Joomla to build several club or member sites. It's also FREE, open-source, and is supported and expanded by developers everywhere. There are thousands of free extensions available to extend its functionality in the JED (Joomla Extensions Directory).

You can download Joomla free from www.joomla.org.

It integrates with facebook and twitter quite easily, so you can show a facebook or twitter feed anywhere in the site. It allows you to insert photos and videos into your pages without any coding. Also you can set other users up to be able to edit the page.

Installation is quite simple. You need a hosting account with a mysql database (mysql is a type of database). You simply upload the files, create a database, connect the two together during the step-by-step installation and you have your site. After that customization is easy enough, there are easy-to-follow tutorials for changing the logo and colors. The new version of Joomla comes with some very nice templates built-in that make it extremely easy for anyone to build a nice looking and very functional website, literally in minutes.

I have been building websites with Joomla for over 7 years now, it has never let me or any of my clients down and if you would like to give it a try and have any questions you can pm me or post here.

Hope this is useful.