Website Building Guide For Sports Team
A website for a sports team is one of the numerous ways that you can use to market the club and gain a strong fan base. Building a web site for your team is a task you can achieve in just a matter of hours. Considering the numerous platforms available, it is possible to have a website up that will provide a base where information about the club is displayed and merchandise from the team are sold for profit. By having a website, you are building a strong fanbase for your team, letting your potential fans get to know the team a bit more before finally deciding to support you at, say, the Melbourne stadium for one of your matches.
We will consider using WordPress to build a website. You may, however, choose any other platform that suits you best and customizes it to fit your needs. WordPress provides a lot of tools that enable us to create a site we deem best. Moreover, it is affordable and time-efficient. Several sports teams have created their sites using WordPress such as Dallas Mavericks and Chicago Bulls. Using WordPress as a platform to create a website has the following advantages:
Tech-savvy is not a requirement. It comes with several plugins and tools that you will choose from, with an already designed backend=s. All you need to do is choose from the millions of themes available and edit it.
Easy to customize. Once you have a picture of your site in mind, it is easy to transform it to something tangible, well, something visible. The WordPress dashboard is very easy to comprehend to ensure that you have a very easy time using it. Depending on the design and the skills of the developer, a WordPress site can look very presentable. Even some major teams that are competing at the Docklands stadium in Melbourne have been known to use WordPress for the sites.
Fast to have it on the web. After designing your site, it takes less than an hour to have it launched.
Now, let’s get building. You need to have a number of things in place before you embark on editing your site. Here is the checklist:
- A domain name – Choosing an easy and captivating .com will assure you of traffic to the site you have hosted.
- A sports theme – You can choose a theme and align it with your brand colors and logos to maintain its marketability.
- A web hosting service or a cms website builder – You can opt for a service that provides an easy to use experience
Now that you have the basics of what you need to have your website hosted, you can now begin. Create an account with WordPress and follow the instructions on the dashboard. Once you have an account with WordPress, you can now view a number of plugins that are available.
After identifying the appropriate theme to use for your sports site, you can now edit it to suit your preference. Being a sports website, it is advisable to use the SportsPress plugin available at WordPress to add functionality and responsiveness to your site. This plugin serves a lot of functionalities to the site such as the possibility of adding fixtures to the site, displaying the player profiles and adding results of previous games. Its numerous downloads are proof of how effective it is to a sports website.
Other than this plugin, you can choose from several others, putting into consideration their ratings, reviews and its active count of installations. These three will help you gauge how effective the plugin is towards generating traffic to your site and how easy it will be to interact with it. Once you have selected a plugin and installed it, you can proceed to create and edit the pages. On the pages, you can add widgets, photos, and texts to add information about the sports team.
After adding and setting up the pages, you can customize the pages to the colors you wish to have to your site. This is just how simple creating your own sports website is!
In the current technological world, it is important for a sports team to go by the norm in a bid to stay at the top and become globally competitive. Having an effective website design is one way in which this can be achieved, alongside social media and adverts. The web design of a sports team has to capture a number of things since it is an important representation of the team.
A great sports website should encompass the following aspects:
- Simplicity – Before starting to create your team sports web, you need to visualize how you would like it to appear. Having this mental picture will assist in removing any info that may seem overwhelming or may be too much for the fans or visitors to the page. In as much as you would like to use images, widgets and gimmicks alongside texts for an appealing look, you should align them to a particular functionality that they serve in order to make the sight seem “crowded”.
- Visibility – It is of key importance that you ensure the content on the site can be easily read. Again, just like images and gimmicks, texts can also seem “crowded”. At this point, the whole idea of marketing your team becomes dissolved since fans will not even have a second look when they see the site that way. If you happen to have a lot of new updates and news, you should consider having large white spaces and clear font.
- Marketability – This is part of the crucial things a sports team should pay keen interest to. A team’s branding speaks volumes to the fans. While building your team’s website, try to incorporate the team’s colors and logo. This will easily identify your team and make it recognizable with the fans.
- User-friendliness – While building your site, you must always appeal to the interest of the reader on the other end. Having this in mind, you must create your site in a manner in which the fans or the users will easily relate. This does not only mean for the desktop but also for mobile users. Nowadays, many people prefer viewing sites from their phones or tablets. Create a site that can accommodate them as well.
- Professionalism – Always try to customize your website to look as professional as possible. To achieve this, you may use photos of the players in action or add the team member’s profiles. You may be doing your fans a huge favor by posting full photos of their envied stars in action. This is definitely a pull! Also, it may be worth it to invest in a routine consultation with a managed IT service provider to make sure that your website runs smoothly.
- Latest updates and info – In order to always keep the fans coming and growing your fan base, you should always keep them informed with up to date information and news that concern the club. This way, they get a sense of belonging and will always keep coming for more. You can also give features of matches that are forthcoming in order to keep them informed.
- Contacts – It is crucial to keep in contact with your fans. Therefore, provide a page where you can give your social media information and email address. This way, it is easier for the fans to give their opinions and their views on matters that generally affect the team.
In this current technological era, making websites has been simplified by the numerous platforms such as WordPress and Wix. These sites enable you to customize your site in a manner that will be appealing and responsive. It is also never a bad idea to seek professional help from web designers and IT consultant companies to achieve even better results.
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