Hockey club website

We started to work together in the spring of 2020. We were presented with a draft of the web design during our first meeting. We've provided feedback and help to finalize it. Until September we communicated with data providers about the requirements of the new website. In the fall, after everything was ready, we could start the development.

We've used the Sage starter theme to build a custom WordPress theme. Sage helped us do so while using modern-age development, like Laravel Blade templates, controllers, and webpack builder with automatic JavaScript splitting per route. For the visuals, we've used the good old Bootstrap, although modified using SCSS variables. We've used GIT during the whole process including CI with eslint and stylelint.

The greatest challenge was statistics and data about the current tournament. Initially, the plan was to make this feature even better, but we've only managed to get "widgets" from the Slovakia Hockey Federation. With widgets, we're limited to visual adjustments using CSS without the option to change the content or layout. Therefore we had to drop some features and designs and adjust to the situation.

One exception was the carousel with matches, as seen on the homepage. To accomplish that we had to parse data from the widget and synchronize it with our database, which is error-prone and unreliable, but sadly, not having an API, is our only option.

The new website replaced the previous website, which already had a good reputation in search engines. It was crucial to not only keep the positions but even make them better. The content of the website is managed by the Club. We made sure that search engines can effectively crawl the website and rate it as a quality source of information with great UX. We've also added necessary redirects so that old links would still work with the new website structure.