Team 180 Sports
The Brief
Team 180 Sports is the premier girls' lacrosse program in Denver. Student athletes are well known for going on to high level competition in college and beyond.
The website, though, did not reflect the high-end nature of the program. Several factors were working against it:
- Clunky, dated design
- Complicated navigation prevented visitors from getting where they wanted to go
- The website did not look good on mobile
- Unfriendly back end did not give Team 180 staff an easy way to update events so athletes could register and pay
- While waiting for someone else to update the events, Team 180 was losing out on sales
Emerging competitors in the Denver market presented a much better web presence, and this was costing Team 180 in new and returning sign-ups.
One factor the website DID have in its favor was its integration with a relatively obscure payment gateway, which charged Team 180 much less than the standard 2.9% per transaction. This banking arrangement was saving Team 180 thousands of dollars every year.
Our Approach
To remedy Team 180's problems, we approached the website rebuild with three goals.
- Create a sleeker, modern design that better reflects the caliber of the club
- Increase Team 180's sales by streamlining the registration process
- Implement an easy-to-use system for Team 180 staff to update the trainings and tournaments for athletes to sign up
We replaced the badly outdated design with a clean, modern look. The old site had been built for an estimated 800-pixel width desktop screen, which made the overall effect feel very cluttered. In opening up the margins, we created a better flow and a much more comfortable user experience.
While we were at it, we made the website mobile responsive as well!
The messaging, which had previously been all over the place, was reduced to the three core age groups Team 180 serves: elementary-age, middle school, and high school. Users are now able to quickly find their program with these simplified options.
Team 180 staff now also have the ability to easily add tournament and training registration pages. With an easy-to-use content management system in place and an intuitive e-commerce platform installed, creating more revenue opportunities has become a snap.
We also built a custom payment gateway plugin to integrate Team 180's existing payment processor with the new ecommerce platform. This allows Team 180 to continue enjoying their savings of several thousand dollars per year over the big name payment processors.
The Results
The Team 180 athletes (and their parents) and staff alike have been thrilled with how easy the new system is to use. With a greatly simplified checkout process, parents have been signing up their athletes at a higher rate than before. And because there's no delay anymore waiting for a developer to add new trainings and tournaments, the club's revenues have seen a decided bump thanks to the immediacy of their offerings.
In short, the site has gone from a pain in the ass to something that works well for everybody involved.
Shortly after the new website launched, Team 180 joined forces with Nike Lacrosse, which is so exclusive that only one club in a given area can affiliate with them. While we can't claim exclusive credit for that, the new high-caliber website certainly didn't hurt in that conversation!
See the site in action at:
http://www.team180sports.com
