A sports website is NOT the same as a business website… or is it?

Recently, we have been having quite a few discussions about websites for sporting bodies, be they clubs or national governing bodies. It has highlighted to us the differences (and similarities) between websites for clubs and sites for businesses.

1. Who is the visitor?
This is a problem that is seen all the time, visit a website and try and decide who the visitor to that site is from the website. Is it a site for fans? Is it a site for players? Is it a site for coaches? Is it a site for funding bodies? Is it a site for referees, etc etc etc. Often the answer is “all of the above” and this is fine and to be expected. However, we would suggest that you create independent sites for all these types of visitors. Decide/discover who the most important visitor is and build a site around them, then create secondary sites for the other groups and link to them from your primary visitors site.

So if fans are the most important, build a site with lots of information for fans. Put the latest news in one column, put the form to buy tickets in the other. or maybe that will be the schedule of games and merchandise. Or a discussion forum?

2. Multiple sites are ok.
You do not need to force everything into one website, this is a common error. use subdomains or sub directories and link between them where appropriate. Your players shouldn’t need to trawl past news about refereeing seminars or committee meetings to find out when the new uniforms are arriving. They need to be able to get to that other information, but think about what they want to see first and make it easy to find.

Think about: referees.yoursport.com players.yoursport.com sponsors.yoursport.com officials.yoursport.com fans.yoursport.com

3. Make your site do something.
Your visitors are visiting your site to do something. It may be catching up on the latest results, maybe getting a training programme or the latest amendment to the club rules. Ensure that the site(s) you create deliver, find out what it is your visitors want to achieve and make it as easy as humanly possible for them to do that.

This goes for sales to, don’t make it hard for your visitor to spend money with you. Be that buying kit, paying fees or making a donation; find the easiest way possible to get the least information required to deliver what the visitor wants. Don’t make them jump through hoops, the simpler you make it the better!

4. Be yourself, avoid stuff readily available elsewhere.
The internet is full of generic websites, full of the same information. Websites like Wikipedia for example make general information available in ways that you can’t compete with. So why waste you and your visitors time recreating content available elsewhere. Do you need a “History of the sport” section on you club website? Do you want a feed of the latest international results if all your visitors are parents of kids in your club just looking for pictures of their son/daughter competing or collecting an award?

Every organisation has uniqueness, share that uniqueness in your site. There is little point in covering news that the BBC/NBC/CNN might deliver. Share information that only you can share.

5. Update all the time!
Every week sports people train, they compete, they get hurt, they win, they lose. Share all this on your website and people will come back to the site time and time again to discover what has been updated. If your site has the exact same content this week as it had last week, then visitors might leave it two weeks before they come back. If it has been a month since anything has changed they might leave it a couple of months… if ever.

6. Plan for change.
Following on from point 5, plan out changes to your website. Plan out when you will update the results, plan out when you will add content, when you will remove it. You should also plan out when you will change the look of the site, plan when you will try and add new features, when you will trial new ideas.

7. Get the visitors involved.
If you are creating a website for your sponsors, go talk to them about what they want to see when they visit the website. Put it in place, show it to them, then ask them what they want again. Repeat this over and over with all the groups of visitors. Get a group of coaches in a room and talk to them, get a group of referees, players, fans and ask them to tell you what they want from the website.

Consult, deliver, review, repeat!

What about a business website?

This article is about sports websites and how to design websites for sport. However, businesses can follow the same 7 points with their websites. Just replace the terms with customers, staff, partners and the like. Create a website fo the most important group first (customers normally). But don’t forget your partners and your staff. Create sites that deleiver something uniquely created for your suppliers, for your staff, for their families even.

Make sure that everytime someone visits your website they get what they wanted from visiting. Hone the site to make that simpler and easier with every revision of the website. Make the site uniquely you, don’t try and be Amazon if you are a small local bookshop that sells boat books. Highlight and accentuate your uniqueness, make your site special. And again, get out there and engage with your visitors about your website. Do people want something you are not delivering? How do you know? Go ask some people and find out.

Of course all this takes time and effort and a degree of experience and knowledge of what is technically possible and practical given the resources at you disposal. If you are a business, a sport or a governing body, you need to balance what is possible against what you can afford to do in terms of finances, time and people.

enVirtua, of course is here to help in this area. Use us to build your website(s) and you can use our knowledge, experience and people.
For more information please contact us on 020 7193 8987 or email sales@envirtua.com please also take a look at some of our pages about our web services: http://envirtua.com/web-services/ and http://envirtua.com/web-services/web-design/ for example. We also offer website hosting http://envirtua.com/hosting/index.html so that we can be a “one stop shop”.

Information on our sport specific services are available at: http://envirtua.com/sport/ and examples for specific sports are available at: http://envirtua.com/sport/?sport=Judo , http://envirtua.com/sport/?sport=Rugby and http://envirtua.com/sport/?sport=Tae Kwon Do