THE WEBWORKS BLOG


We may not be sailors, but we know sailing

We've been working on some great projects during the past year, but I want to spend some time focusing on three that have us deeply involved in yachting organizations.

 

We just completed a website for the International Sunfish Class, the organization that oversees regattas for the Sunfish  Class of yachts worldwide. Our client was looking for a website that had a tropical feel, and emphasized the competitiveness and fun of the class. With 21 regions in 13 countries, the Sunfish website will provide event information for hundreds of regattas annually and now maintains result archives back to 1991. Each of the regions has their own section of the website with region specific news and their own regatta schedule. Members can also pay their dues online through the website.

Our client had some requests for interactive features that we were able to accommodate. There were 2 of these on the home page. They wanted to be able to mouse over the list of regions and have markers light up on an international map. They also wanted to have a slideshow on their home page that had clickable captions, that could link to internal or external pages. Both the images and captions can be changed by our client through the site's control panel.

Sunfish was built with ExpressionEngine, and site administrators have just gone through training so they can maintain much of the site themselves.

Visit http://sunfishclass.org

A large part of this past year has been dedicated to ISSA (Interscholastic Sailing Association), which is the governing organization for High School sailing throughout the United States. With almost 500 member schools, and thousands of active sailors, the website serves as a place to dispense information about the organization and its events, register schools, and as a repository for event results.

This site was also built with ExpressionEngine, but with the addition of the EE multi-site manager, allowed us to share information among 9 sub sites that make up this project. The main site, http://hssailing.org, maintains general information about ISSA, association news, national regatta results, the trophy case, resources, etc. This was the first of the nine sites we built.

Next came the registration site, http://registration.hssailing.org. It is here that administrators register themselves and their school. Administrators can login, edit their school data, add and remove sailors, and access their membership invoice.

The other seven sites are for the regional districts within ISSA. Each of the district sites has its own content, but additionally shares content with both the main site and registration sites. So schools registered on the registration site have their data displayed on the appropriate district sites. News entries added to the main site can be displayed on the district sites. And news that district administrators add to their sub site show up on the main site. The district sites are still not all quite complete, but will be done soon.

All of the ISSA sites share the same basic template design, and work together to share information while still focusing the target audience for each site. There are hundreds of administrators registered, so our goal was to make administration as user-friendly as possible.

Visit http://hssailing.org

One more recent site I want to mention is for SCYYRA, the Southern California Youth Yacht Racing Association, an organization dedicated to improving sailing skills among youth racers in Southern California. They sponsor several major regatta series during the year, but the website also posts information and forms for many youth sailing events throughout the country.

SCYYRA has several major sponsors who receive advertising space on the website.

Visit http://scyyra.org

The above websites are some of the most recent yachting projects we have been working on. We have also had several other projects for specific regattas, and local yachting organizations using both ExpressionEngine and Wordpress. Look through our portfolio to see more of our yachting projects.

If your sailing website, or other sports related site, is ready for an upgrade, let us know. We may not be sailors, but we know what is needed for a sailing website.