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Titans swim club is a competitive swim club based out of Shoreline Leisure Bray in county Wicklow. I started swimming with titans about 10years ago when it just began. Around three years ago I made the transition from swimmer to Coach .As the club grew rapidly the website began to fall behind , I felt it reflected poorly on the club, hindered growth, and was too confusing to be helpful. As such I decided I would take on the project on updating the website.
This project required me using the Sports engine motion CMS system to create a Clean usable website, while it took at lot of learning the finished project has greatly improved the Sites usability and overall made it more pleasant to use while giving it a much branding needed update.
If you look to the right you will see a screenshot of the old website, By talking to the committee and many parents who used the site they found it over complicated ,hard to use , and thought it looked old. The head Coach said she was embarrassed by it. My main goal with this redesign was to simplify the branding making use of their brand colours. I wanted to make the website a place that the club felt proud of by making if a bit more fun and professional.
Another main goal when looking at the website was to make it more user friendly. Titans swim club is made of of volunteers who run the club alongside the paid coaches. We found that a lot of the problems the volunteers where dealing with could be solved by making the website easier to navigate and find what you need, freeing up the volunteers to make real benefits to the club . One primary issue was how information was presented .Looking above can give you and example of the old header which had too many tabs and no clear focus. My goal was to simply this to five or six tabs max and then one page for each squad with all they need on their own squad page.
In order to plan for this project I made many different protypes in Figma. Testing and seeing what worked and what didn't work. While some aspects changed a lot Figma allowed me to rapidly test and try new ideas as well as get feedback prior to the implementing these changes to the live website .
Titans Swim club had to use Sports engine motion CMS site builder to create this website. I was not familiar to this CMS site before starting this project which led to many confused hours trying to figure out how to get the desired effect with the system. It is also quite restrictive with very limited Customisability luckily had limited HTML and CSS support which allowed me to implement my deigns albeit changed to fit within the constraints of the CMS site.
One key step during the development was working with the team of volunteers and finding out what they needed form the website. This involved many meeting and unfortunately there are still items in development today. But this process of testing and consulting with the volunteers allowed me to better understand the gaols they had in mind and create a better website .
Like many designs this website made many different variations, during the development I may have realised that it just doesn't look like I had planed in Figma or maybe my design just dint work this caused many different designs to be mocked up in Figma some drastically different some with only small changes but all with the knowledge I gained throughout the process.
Making this website has been a lesson in defining my goals following feedback from the committee. We have seen a decease in questions asked to them and instead people are using the website to find the answers. We have also got quite positive feedback from the users in term of the design with many saying it is "much better". Lastly my initial goals of simplifying the navigation worked and I have reduced the amount of unnecessary content on the website .
Making this website proved me with a lot of new skills as well and strengthend my existing skills
This project for me has been quite a learning opportunity and helped my grow my skills and my character.
While it was not as easy as I had predicted this was my first website designed for a real client outside of a college class. As such it posed some unique difficulties mainly the leaning curve of sports engine motion. I also ran into some issues regarding accessibility and how the CSM builder handled responsive design. But despite the difficulties I am quite happy with my first website .