UTSA Athletics Website
Website Design & Content Management
Collaboration: Sidearm Sports
overview & Challenge
This was an exciting project for me to be able to work on utilizing my past skills as a web designer. This is a website on a much bigger scale though with the amount of items to consider for an Athletic Department. However, I loved the process of collaborating with our Communications team and Sidearm Sports who developed the website. With my previous experience, I was able to design a concept and be able to bridge the gap working with coding and development. My goal is to keep building the website to ultimately become the central hub for everything UTSA Athletics. With the importance of being up-to-date in digital space, this has been one of my favorite projects to help execute for UTSA Athletics.
The main challenge was to bring the website to current website standards. Not only aesthetically but functionality wise it was not responsive for standard mobile use. It’s important to make sure a website is responsive enough to adapt from desktop to tablet and mobile devices. Next was to work with Communications team to figure out what aspects of website are most important and figure out how to make as easy as possible to update. The example below was previous website that did not fit standards to how much better our Athletic Department website can be.
Concept & Design
After many meetings with our Communications team and other staff, I was able to come up with a solution to revamp the website. I gathered together all our favorite websites from other Universities especially our competition in Conference USA. This helped to make us stand out from them and have our own identity. I also studied other websites Sidearm Sports have developed to better understand what elements were reasonable to add and build. This was important because of the time crunch we were in to revamp this website quickly and in timely fashion.
Next my thought process was to make sure this concept fit our branding standards as far as proper logo and color usage. Also to build it with user experience in mind from giving our targeted audiences the proper information and content. All should lead to a conversion of more brand awareness, donating or ticket sales. I thought about layout of starting with a clean navigation for the user to get to anywhere on the site they need. I focusing on quick hit sections that are updated frequently from stories, schedules, video content, social media and promotion slider. A simple and minimal design that has ease of legibility and can stand the test of time for the next years to come. This homepage layout will set the tone for the rest of the pages on the website.
Outcome
After final approval and presenting my concept to Sidearm Sports, they were very easy and good to work with. They were able to match my concept as close as possible within their standards. They adjusted many aspects to help for better optimization and user experience. For example font usage and color contrast accessibility. They added nice touches on certain UI elements like orange stripe as accent color to our navy blue. Overall updated and optimized for diverse use of browsers and devices.
