|
Youth sports play a big role in the community where I live as well as when I was growing up. Things are different now though. The private youth association, staffed by volunteers, funds, promotes, coaches and manages youth sports up to high school. The school no longer funds or manages these sports. These youth associations work hard to sponsor safe, healthy sports activities for the youth. They strive to promote physical, emotional, and social development in the youth of their communities.
 The Spencer – Van Etten Youth Association (SVEYA) approached s-go Consulting about building a new website to better support local families and the youth who participate. The website that they had been managing was straight HTML and becoming hard for them to manage and update. It was old school. We proposed a new Joomla website with fast loading pages, a simple clean interface and easy navigation. SVEYA manages baseball, basketball, cheerleading, football, soccer, softball and wrestling. We also looked at youth association websites from other communities for ideas.
Joomla Template
We decided to design our own clean template using Artisteer. We have developed a very Web 2.0, simple base template and we make modifications in Artisteer specific to the client, before we install the template. We then did further modification of the template in CSS once content was created and all functional components was configured.
Seven Mini Websites
Because this youth association has directors for each sport, we decided to build seven mini websites inside of the new site. Each sport would have its own landing or home page, as well as other specific content to each sport. For instance, Football has games and playoffs. Wrestling has meets and tournaments. Also, each director is only able to modify content specific to his/her sport. For this feature, the core Joomla access control features were not sufficient, as we could not provide control to specific sport category. So we used the Admin User Access component from Pages and Items.
Interactive Calendar
The website has a master interactive events calendar for all sports activities, but also each sport is a unique event category, so when you are in content for a specific sport, you will see coming events specific to that sport on all pages. We used JCal Pro from Anything Digital for this solution.
Contacts
For website contacts, we used QContacts form as it is very similar to the Joomla core contact component, but it includes integrated captcha to combat spam. It also has some other added features. It is easy to contact the directors for each sport via email.
Forms
Initially, we were going to build a master sign-up form with areas specific to each sport and optional online payment with PayPal. As of this time, we are just posting PDF forms for each sport for download. There is also the ubiquitous Code of Conduct form, which is ALWAYS available as a download and every athlete must sign.
Newsflash Scroller
For announcements, newsflashes, scores, cancellations and other timely news, we have installed the Gavick New Highlighter GK1. This is a newsflash scroller, which is highly configurable.
Joomla Sitemap
For this and every Joomla website, we use XMAP from http://joomla.vargas.co.cr/. This component is highly configurable and not only offers a great in page sitemap for navigation, but provides a Google and Bing compatible sitemap XML file for submission to the search engines.
SEO/SEF
The site uses the sh404SEF component which creates Joomla SEF URLs, and turns them to a more user-friendly format for your site visitors, as well as for search engines.
Almost every community needs a youth association website of this caliber. It will streamline communication and empower sports programs for our children. This website is not officially live as of the posting of this blog. The directors are adding content to their specific pages.
|
