Football Association of Wales | Web Design

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faw.cymru

A new website for a new era of Welsh football

Background

The Football Association of Wales (FAW) is the governing body of association football in Wales, and the third-oldest in the world. In 2016, led by Gareth Bale (the world’s most expensive footballer) and a glut of Premier League stars, Wales will compete in their first major tournament since 1958: the European Championships in France. Never has it been more exciting to be a Welsh football fan.

Limegreentangerine were appointed to design and develop a new FAW website to solidify the Welsh team as serious players on the footballing world stage.

Goals

The brief was to drive meaningful and responsive connections to fans new and old, putting the full digital experience that they deserve at their fingertips and bringing them closer to the teams and competitions.

Tactics

Previously things were difficult to find on the site, with important documents and information buried. The new structure and functionality were tested using prototyping tools and wireframe planning to allow the user journey to be put through its paces and refined, as the visitor volumes will significantly increase in the build up and through the Euro championships.

As well as the international squad, we also wanted to feature and give prominence to the weekly domestic clubs and matches happening across Wales. FAW Cup matches now have their own dedicated game pages with related news and match information pulled into these areas. Drilling down to specific games or finding more general information is now a doddle in the news and fanzone sections.

site page views (and counting)

...from around the world during the Euros

Empowering the team

The biggest limitation of the previous website was the CMS. FAW staff now have full access to update content across the entire website. We also developed a number of bespoke modules to empower FAW staff to keep the site fresh with ease and speed.

We created a bespoke social aggregator to populate the FAW Social Hub with official Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, AudioBoom and YouTube feeds which are automatically checked, updated and cached at specific intervals to reduce bandwidth demand.

A fixtures module gives FAW the ability to manage forthcoming international matches. Via the dashboard, the Admin can add, edit games, times and venues, update scores and assign TV channel coverage. We also developed a feature which automatically presents a splash screen to new visitors advertising the latest match. This includes call-to-actions to purchase tickets, view match information or catch up on match reports.

As the news makes up a large proportion of the website with articles published daily, it was essential that this section was easy for Admin to use and articles simply categorised, searched and fed into relevant areas of the site. A comprehensive tagging system means ease of assigning articles to different levels of football and to specific fixtures, bringing match pages alive with associated stories. Articles can also be assigned to specific Twitter hashtags and handles linking official FAW and player Tweets with stories.

Finally, a bespoke banner module was developed for Admin to easily update the homepage carousel with prime news and promotional advertising. Slides can be created using a combination of imagery, text and video with call-to-action buttons that can link to internal pages, external sites or YouTube videos.

Together Stronger

With a comprehensive banner manager, a powerful news section and social aggregator, the website now acts as a platform for sharing the latest football news across all social channels, bringing fans closer to the game, and closer to the Welsh players.

Together, these features allow the site to serve as a hub for Welsh football in all of its dimensions. We have taken great care to ensure the new FAW site is now a useful, dynamic, data-rich resource for all Welsh football fans.

The Football Association of Wales needed a website that can best serve all of its different functions as the governing body of the game in Wales, from international football and domestic cup competitions to the rules and regulations of the game. It was also vitally important that all of the FAW’s rich digital content is represented across all of our platforms. Limegreentangerine were identified as the Welsh company who could help make all of this possible and their dedicated and skilled team have worked tirelessly to help us create a website that will take us to EURO 2016 and beyond. Rob Dowling, New Media & Publications Manager

Wales Football

Services

Sector

Visit

Background

Goals

Tactics

site page views (and counting)

Empowering the team

Together Stronger

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