SportsBackers

Transforming Richmond to Support a More Active Community

Strategy, Responsive Website, WordPress Integration

Visit The SportsBackers Site 

The Brief

Sports Backers pursues a goal to transform greater Richmond into the most physically active community in the nation by leading the area in embracing and celebrating an active lifestyle. Their Events and Programs are designed to foster active lifestyles for everyone.

Background

The Sports Backers came to COLAB because they needed a new site design that would work on desktop computers, tablet devices, and mobile smartphones. But turning The Sports Backers website into a standard mobile responsive site had some clear challenges.

The Problem

The biggest challenge was the varying complexity of sporting events and races that The Sports Backers coordinates. Some events, like the Ukrop’s Monument Avenue 10k, are fairly complicated, involving many “sub-events” and peripheral activities that are part of the overall event, but separate from the 10k race that is the core of the event. Other events are more straight-forward, involving just a single race and far fewer details to convey to participants.

Additionally, The Sports Backers does a lot more than just hosting races. They have a number of training teams that help people prepare for races through a guided training regimen. They also support a handful of community activity initiatives, like Bike Walk RVA, Kids Run RVA, and Active RVA, which need their own communication tools, such as blogs and social sharing.

Sports Backers website

The Solution

Our solutions for The Sports Backers feature some of our very best design work and some of our most skilled development work extending the WordPress content management system.

Design

In terms of design, we paid great attention to menuing and site navigation, especially given the need for making a site that is simple to use on mobile smartphones and tablet devices. Also of critical importance was large visuals to convey the spirit of the events, and large, clear calls to action to encourage visitors to register for races.

Development

For the development, we extended WordPress extensively using Advanced Custom Fields to build highly modular events. The events, at their base, are fairly simple posts. For more complicated events, site administrators can add additional content and related other posts and pages to build out a more complex event.

Results

In summary, The Sports Backers website is a highly dynamic and fluid website, much like The Sports Backers organization itself.