Portfolio Bristol & West Hockey Club
Date:
August 2009
Client:
Bristol and West Hockey Club
Bristol & West Hockey Club approached me to redesign and develop a new website that would serve as both a place for club members to visit to check on the performance of teams and the latest club news, but also as a promotional tool to attract new players for their teams.
After outlining the required content for the new website, a wireframe was put together to allow me to present the club with a basic idea as to how I saw the layout of the website ending up. This process was helpful as it allowed the club to give me feedback on the design of the website at its most basic level. After this stage I was able to develop my ideas into a polished design.
When designing the website, I wanted to focus on giving users access to as much information as possible in order to make their visit to the site as easy and quick as possible. Club members may be visiting the website during their lunch break and need to be able to get the information they want very quickly. The homepage was key to this idea. I used a ‘tabbed’ section in which users could see the most recent result, next fixture and current league table for every team, and a list of the most recent news articles.
Their current website was maintained by one person and as such, updating the results and developments for a club with 8 senior teams and 2 junior teams was often a lot of work. The club wanted to have a website that could be accessed by a number of club members (e.g. each team captain) to allow the workload to be spread. This would not only make the weekly updates much easier, but would also promote making more frequent and informative updates. I used Wordpress to enable the entire website to be edited quickly and easily, and from any computer. The use of a Content Management System like Wordpress also means that information added can be outputted onto a number of pages, thus allowing for a lot of ‘automatic’ updates to be made.
The club we’re incredibly happy with the outcome. Since going live, the website has had over 5000 visits, with 50+ news articles being posted and 14 sets of photos being added. The website has evolved from something with the most basic of information, to a real hub of activity for the club.
Responsibilities:
Design, Development, SEO
Technologies:
CMS, CSS, jQuery, Wordpress, xHTML
