CHAPEL HILL — The North Carolina High School Athletic Association has unveiled a new look for its web site.
The NCHSAA has been working with a nationally known web design firm, DesignHammer, for about a year on an overhaul of the website, also utilizing feedback from a special committee made up of representatives of NCHSAA member schools.
The new design, which is cleaner and more intuitive, still contains all the information NCHSAA member schools have come to rely on but is much simpler to navigate.
“We are very pleased with the new look and functionality of our web site,” said commissioner Davis Whitfield. “It is easier to navigate and helps to elevate our web presence. The site has a number of excellent new features that should be very helpful to visitors to our site, so we believe that this use of technology positions us well for years to come.”
NCHSAA assistant director of communications Quanta’ Holden has worked closely with DesignHammer throughout the entire process and serves as the NCHSAA webmaster.
The new website utilizes responsive design, optimizing it for most Web-browsing platforms and viewing contexts, so users of the website will have easy access from most smartphones, desktops, tablets or laptops. The new home page includes a scrolling ticker of final scores from playoff games. The scores are pulled from the latest live updates from MaxPreps, an online publisher of scores, photography and video clips for high school athletics in the United States and a corporate partner of the NCHSAA.
Because the NCHSAA serves as the source for information on playoff and championship games, the new website features an organized way to present tournament brackets. Brackets generated in MaxPreps are automatically added to the brackets archive on the NCHSAA website. New brackets created are interactive with links to individual schools and stats in MaxPreps.
DesignHammer delivered a new website built in the Drupal 7 platform, the most recent version of the popular content management system. The Drupal CMS allows for easy access to and management of website content, and is used by prominent sports organizations such as the NCAA, Major League Soccer and National Basketball Players’ Association.
DesignHammer also built an importer that would allow the NCHSAA to upload a file with data about the member schools, which would then import into the website and populate an interactive map of schools.
In addition to the interactive map of schools, each school has its own detail page. These pages are complete with a Google map, link to Google directions, contact information, website, classification, conference and mascot.
To serve the various NCHSAA audiences, the new website provides clear entry points to information, and was carefully architected to do so.
“By migrating the website to Drupal 7, a free and open source content management system, the NCHSAA now has a solid foundation for communicating with their audience for years to come,” said Kosta Harlan, Drupal developer at DesignHammer.