Most fans have their favorite kinds of sports or sports leagues and naturally want to follow them online, among other things. Consequently, web site owners need to provide them with a smooth transition from off-line mass media to online sport leagues and vice versa.
However, online league user experience should give them even more opportunities to get plentiful and detailed information regarding their favorites (players, teams or championships), to socialize, comment and discuss current and past results, to feel in the thick of things, events and people.
It is certainly a complicated task requiring professional sports software. For Joomla web site owners below we present 15 hints to ease this burden and fine-tune league web sites to get plentiful grateful feedback from visitors.
To this purpose you can take advantage of the dedicated software products by BearDev including Joomla! CMS sport extension, JoomSport add-ons and dedicated Joomla templates able to provide you with all necessary features and beyond.
1. Responsive Layout
Nowadays, responsive interface is a mandatory component of great user experience enabling visitors to stay in touch with their hobby or professional activity on the 24/7 basis. Responsive design also makes your Google desktop and mobile rankings more successful.
JoomSport hint: In order to correspond to the best examples of UI you have to implement responsive Joomla CMS templates, e.g. Joomla responsive sport template Kodiak. You should also make sure that all the extensions used on your site are also responsive. For that you can utilize the JoomSport responsive add-on making all your sport pages mobile friendly.
2. Teams Branding
Team logos added to their names makes content perception more convenient allowing fans to find their teams in seconds within the crowded calendars and Standings.
JoomSport hint: The smallest acceptable size of logo images is 30x30 px. The recommended size of logos in the new coming JoomSport release will be 100x100 px.
3. Photos in Web Site Style
Already known, that users perceive visuals much better than texts and often abandon too long descriptions. You should add multiple photos to players, teams, matches, and venues setting the tone of your professional league in this way.
JoomSport hint: The optimal size of illustrative pictures should be between 200 and 800 px width that is enough for both great picture quality and site performance. The consistency of photo dimensions within a gallery is also very important since different sizes and aspect ratios of photos make them looking sloppy and unattractive.
4. Detailed Matches
Team sports matches include naturally much more statistics than the one-on-one games, at least as far as they embrace 10-20 players instead of a single pair. So, you need to display goals, goal assists, red cards, substitutions, etc. in a common manner intuitively clear for users. For this purpose you can utilize different service image thumbnails such as balls, boots, red swatches, etc.
JoomSport hint: JoomSport allows you to create players events including both player statistics in different values and illustrative pictures added to them.
5. Rich Sports Content
Detailed information on teams and players allows your web site to constantly collect returning traffic and position itself as an expert of the certain sport niche. Multiple extra fields containing different types of content create an extended view of teams and players, including their history and achievements.
JoomSport hint: Build your detailed information of matches, players, teams, seasons, clubs and venues on different types of dedicated JoomSport extra content fields, including text areas, radio buttons, drop-box selectors, links, etc.
6. Filled-in Calendars
Championship calendars are the main point of attraction for the majority of users. In those cases when they find them empty or scarce, it can be frustrating and cause exits.
JoomSport hint: You can walk through a great example of an eloquent and useful calendar in our Sport league demo.
7. Detailed Match Statistics
Reading detailed match statistics is always valuable for true sports lovers as it provides deep dive into the very basics of a certain game. Sufficient data allow you to analyze failures and successes, evaluate the contribution of each player, recollect matches and finalize results.
The provided information is usually displayed on several pages, including season tables and team pages, so it makes your sports league site neat and user-friendly.
Hint: The multivariate and simple access to statistics is the sign of a high-quality user interface.
8. Detailed Player Statistics
This functionality area of your web site is possibly even more important for users, since most people tend to be interested in personalities and certainly love their favorite players more than their favorite teams. Fans always cheer for their favorites and are glad finding them a league best forward or goalkeeper, for example. So, give them that chance to be happy.
JoomSport hint: Automated summing of single events (goals, assists, and saves) is the best way to aggregate player or team statistics and, JoomSport provides you with this functionality. It tracks and summarizes events backstage and displays the totals using the Player Statistics module.
9. Match Announcement Blocks
Just in line with quick access to information and detailed descriptions stand match announcements and highlights. You can use such modules to display upcoming and played matches for your visitors in a neat and convenient way.
JoomSport hint: The Next Matches and Match Result modules enable you to place sidebar widgets on the main page and lets visitors know the upcoming matches or results of played games just immediately.
10. Live News Block
Live sports news allow you to ensure your niche expertise and attract additional users looking for the latest sports information. Later on these occasional guests have all chances to become regular visitors and widen your loyal audience.
Hint: You can take advantage of ready-made widgets provided by sports leagues (e.g. FIFA) or by sports news aggregators (e.g. football.co.uk) or you can manage the content of your news feed independently using widgets provided by numerous professions developers.
11. Detailed Venue
Many famous sports teams have their own arenas that are the elements of branding and club identity, in fact. So, all detailed information and curious facts about these stadiums will certainly add value to your content.
JoomSport hint: As soon as this information is added to the Venue entity, visitors will immediately get a chance to reach it from team and match descriptions. JoomSport allows you to create two types of venues: a plain text and individual venue page, including detailed description, address, and photos. Undoubtedly, we recommend you to take advantage of the second option.
12. Highlighted Favorites
If your site presents a particular team, you need to have an opportunity to highlight it among other league participants throughout the Standings regardless of its current position.
JoomSport hint: JoomSport allows you to highlight your own team in different colors configurable from the backend on the Sport League Standings table page.
13. Comments System
Comments are absolutely indispensable for sports web sites and provide several advantages simultaneously. Firstly, they allow customers to share their impressions on matches and players, secondly, thanks to them them visitors are able to compare their own opinions with other standpoints, and finally, hot discussions update your page content and make it more SEO-friendly.
JoomSport hint: If you need to add comments to the Match Details page, please follow the Configuration -> General tab path.
14. Social Sharing Buttons
Similar value is provided by social sharing buttons allowing visitors to show their excitement and attitude to certain news, matches, players, etc.
15. Advanced Access Permissions
Sports league web sites with a limited number of matches and teams may take only one editor, but detailed and high-quality content for several leagues with numerous players naturally requires several authors and reviewers. In this case you need a content management system providing configurable access permissions to your admin area. Really effective access management systems include three or even more access layers, including access and editing of championships, seasons, teams, etc.
JoomSport hint: The JoomSport component allows you to give the rights of content editing in several different ways:
- Season Administrator - able to create, edit and delete Players, Teams, Matchdays and Matches of available seasons;
- Team Moderator - able to add unregistered players or invite Joomla registered or unregistered players to teams, invite players to matches.
The FE Management module enables admins to manage the frontend information related to players and matches.
Conclusion
If you have all the above functionalities and characteristics implemented on
your sports league web site, you can rightfully consider it substantially developed and user-friendly. And, the JoomSport products will help you to make this process straightforward and painless.
You can find all the required information regarding our products or purchase them in our online store. You can also try their functionality in practice in our demos.
Please contact us on any questions you have.
Comments 1
Great reading, thanks.