Your club’s or sports team’s official website is a pivotal part of online real estate. It serves as the public face of your team or club and is likely to be the very first place people go to learn more about you. It should ideally enlighten your followers, draw in new ones, and include the most recent information on your activities, victories, defeats, and other events.
Fortunately, WordPress makes it simple to create a free website for your team. Perhaps you are considering designing a website for your club or team. Or maybe you already possess one, but it needs some work. Some technical improvements and polishing? But where do you begin?
Rest assured that we have your back. Today, we will examine nine strategies to enhance the operation and design of your sports team’s website so that your team’s online presence accurately represents it.
Guidelines for Creating a Superb Sports Team Website
Online users make a decision about whether to linger on a website in a matter of seconds. As you may imagine, that is only enough time for a cursory perusal and not quite enough time to assimilate any of the content.
The following advice will help you make your website visually striking and in line with modern web design trends.
Make It Simple
When it pertains to website components, there is surely such a thing as too much good. While providing a wealth of information to your visitors is a good thing, striving to wow them by including every gimmick and widget possible can quickly backfire and result in overwhelm. As a result, you should first consider each page of your website and what each of them is specifically meant to do. Then get rid of everything that is unnecessary to achieve that aim. Everything, indeed. Your website is cluttered with widgets, text, and photos that serve no useful purpose.
“As much as necessary, as little as possible” is the adage. The same applies to the remainder of your design. A straightforward, flat design style is on the rise. Why does that matter? You only need to look at your phone, then. In their smartphone operating systems, Google and Apple both use flat designs. Avoid textures, gradients, and other features that appear to be pseudo-3D, to put it simply. It greatly improves the elegance and efficiency of the design of your sports team’s website.
Use a Big, Simple Font and Whitespace
Make sure it is simple for your readers to absorb, especially if your page has a lot of lengthy content, like news or a blog. These are the two essential components:
- fonts
- whitespace
The so-called negative space that surrounds all content items is referred to as whitespace. It means that each paragraph has a lot of white space around it. This makes the information easier to read and comprehend. White space calms the eyes and gives the mind room to breathe. It enables your visitors to concentrate on the content, which is what actually matters.
Font style and size make up the second essential component. There are a lot of intriguing studies on the best typefaces to use. The recommendation is to choose a plain typeface at a size of at least 14px, preferably larger. Team members and fans alike can follow everything significant about your team in this way without needing to dig out their prescription glasses or utilize the zoom feature of their browsers.
Keep Your Team’s Branding Strong
Here is a brain teaser: What will happen if your squad showed up at your next game wearing the jerseys of the other team? Do you believe your supporters would simply accept it, make adjustments, and support you anyhow? Obviously not!
Your team’s identity, which includes your shirt and colors, is what gives it its identity and how it portrays your club. Should your site differ? Don’t you want your devoted followers to feel right at home whenever they visit? You must therefore ensure that your website is identifiable not only by name but also by appearance.
Your club’s ‘branding’ mostly consists of your club’s colors and logo. Fortunately, WordPress makes it simple to alter the color scheme of any element and swap out the header text for your logo image with a little CSS understanding. After all, this platform is an indispensable part of the list of the best free website builders (and not only them). Having fantastic free themes in excess of 100, a traditional CMS, which WordPress is, heavily relies on themes. Whilst you may have some flexibility over how your content is laid out, the theme you choose will make the majority of the design decisions specifically for you. Sure, not all themes allow for extensive customization, but that is normal for free website builders.
A few stylistic adjustments via style.css alone is sufficient to make the alterations we mentioned a few lines back. As an alternative, you might employ one of WordPress’ premium sports themes, which lets you easily change the colors without using any code and add your logo using drag and drop. Furthermore, you can brand the WordPress login page and dashboard with the SportsPress Pro plugin.
Adapt Your Website to Mobile Devices
Your sports team’s web design must appear fantastic on any screen in an era where mobile device traffic has surpassed desktop computer traffic. You do, after all, want the images from your most recent victory celebration to appear good on the phones and tablets of your supporters, don’t you? Additionally, mobile friendliness is now taken into account when prioritizing searches by search engines like Google.
It is embarrassing if your own website does not appear first in a Google search for your team name. Making your website mobile-friendly is therefore essential. There are several approaches to achieving this. To achieve this, for instance, there are specific mobile themes and plugins. However, making your primary theme responsive is the best option. This indicates that your page has a dynamic design that changes according to the size of the monitor being used to view it.
You will require the assistance of an experienced developer for that. It is not easy to code for responsive web design. A sports team website template that is responsive right out of the box is another option.
Incorporate Professional Images
You have heard it before that a picture can replace all the words. The quality of the images on your team’s website does convey a great deal to the outside world, which is valid in web design.
Visitors may readily detect unoriginal stock photos these days. The very last thing you want to accomplish while trying to gain more fans is to come across as generic if you employ those. Selfies are also insufficient. You need a professional image. Additionally, do not deny your supporters the chance to see actual images of the individuals they support and heroes they admire.
So don’t skimp on the photos. Employ a professional who is skilled in their field. Your website will be substantially enhanced by it.
Features of the Champions Website
The features and functionality of your team’s website are just as crucial as its overall design when it comes to development. The latter is crucial information, while the former ensures that all important information is conveyed in a visually pleasing manner.
That is what we will discuss next.
Present Upcoming Games
Imagine that game day arrives and nobody is there. Your section of the stands is deserted; there are no cheering, parents, friends, or family present. That is really discouraging, isn’t it? Why didn’t anyone arrive? Because they were completely unaware that a match existed. One of the most important pieces of information you should impart to your fans and followers (as well as the occasional clueless player) is the game schedule.
Of course, WordPress makes it simple to post this as news on your blog. The information can also be distributed via newsletter (you are gathering subscribers, right?). But what if you had a countdown widget placed there on your homepage, telling every fan anxiously anticipating the next game when it would be?
There are a few excellent choices in the WordPress plugin catalog:
- Countdown Timer,
- T(-) Countdown,
- Widget Countdown.
A calendar widget that includes all of the forthcoming games can improve this. Good choices in the case:
- The Events Calendar
- Modern Events Calendar
Your section of the stadium will never remain empty with this combination!
Social Media Accounts and Contact Info
Genuine supporters will inevitably want to stay in touch with your team. It is crucial to be able to contact your club quickly for a variety of reasons, including press requests, sponsorship offers, and many others. Thankfully, there are many opportunities to do so on the Internet.
You should post your contact details on the website as a first step. A specific contact page makes this straightforward to accomplish. Why not improve it with a contact form while you are at it? People can message you directly from the website in this manner.
Several popular contact form plugins include:
- Fast, Secure Contact Form
- Contact Form 7
- Contact Form by BestWebSoft
- Jetpack’s Contact Form
Do not overlook social media either! You presumably already use Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites as responsible Internet users to interact with your followers and fans (upcoming matches are something you should always keep in mind). So why not make it simple for them to locate you there? After all, there are several plugins available that enable you to include social media symbols on your WordPress website:
- Simple Social Icons (our favorite),
- Simple Share Buttons Adder,
- SumoMe,
- Ultimate Social Media.
Just be careful not to let responding to emails, tweets, and Facebook messages interfere with your training.
Latest News
Since we are talking about staying in touch, it only makes sense that club members and fans would want to get the most recent information about your team. They will be interested in learning about wins, losses, and transfers. Not to mention everything occurring off the field. A wonderful method to engage with them is to give players, fans, as well as other concerned parties a peek behind the curtain. Therefore, having a separate news section is essential.
Utilizing WordPress’ blog feature makes this simple to implement. All you have to do is set up a blog page specifically for your postings (already having a front page set up is something we assume you’ve set). To do that, select Pages > Add New and provide the new page a suitable name, like the Latest news. To have it visible on your team’s website, click Publish.
It is time to identify it as the blog at this point. You can do this by switching the Front page layouts to a static page under Settings > Reading. Then select the newly generated news page under the Posts page using the dropdown menus after selecting your default front page. You are done now. You may now start posting articles, pictures, videos, and other content to inform your supporters of everything going on in your organization.
Player Stats and Profiles
As soon as the season is underway, debates about who the club’s best player is quickly begin. Naturally, everyone will defend their preferred player. If only this could be evaluated in an impartial manner… Player statistics come to our aid! Any argument is quickly resolved with a glance at some cold, hard numbers (at least theoretically).
Additionally, you may incorporate this information into player profiles so that supporters can discover further about their favorite players. The SportsPress plugin, for instance, is once again on your side. It enables you to quickly keep tabs on each athlete’s progress during the season and build up player profiles on a specific page, including all individual statistics.
Small Design Changes Can Have a Big Impact
WordPress makes it simple to create a website for a professional sports team. It should not be taken lightly, though; this is a serious matter. After all, it is how the outside world sees your team.
The finest possible representation of your team should be made on your website as a result. That implies, at the absolute least, a neat, uncomplicated interface, a design that matches the branding of your team, and high-quality images.
The website for your sports team must also offer pertinent information to anyone looking to follow, join, or learn more about it. By following these recommendations, you can make sure that your website turns into a valuable resource for your team and a resource center for your followers and fans.
What do you look for in a website for yourself or your favorite team? Additions or thoughts? Please tell us in the comments.
