Blog website design
Spurs Fanatic is a supporter blog that reaches across the globe to die-hard Tottenham Hotspur fans. The site is synonymous with high-level tactical and statistical content within the Spurs community.
The Spurs Fanatic content team wanted a complete refresh of their existing site. They needed to bring it up to date and give it a professional feel, whilst still being able to use the WordPress platform for their content management.
What’s more, Spurs Fanatic also wanted to improve its SEO to take on more traffic from the website’s global appeal. Getting up the google rankings would compliment their current strategy of relying on social media.
Project Overview:
To refresh and update the website for a more professional look and feel. Optimise for search traffic. Develop a consistent brand image and colour palette.
Services Provided:
- WordPress web design and development
- SEO
- Branding
- CMS
Custom WordPress web design
When it comes to sports team websites, magazine designs allow them to show off their latest work front and centre. Content producers have space to present their articles and fans can instantly find the latest one to read and comment on.
The design gave a distinct hierarchy to build upon the traditional WordPress blog layout. A wide header to present the latest article. Two further featured pieces followed to give fans more to get their teeth in to before the remaining front page posts.
Branding
The solution also hit the brief to provide a consistent brand message and colour palette.
A two-tone design of white and navy blue kept the tradition of mirroring the club’s colours. A sans-serif font palette was put together to make headings, titles and page copy much more readable.
UI/UX
A cleaned-up user interface was accompanied by making the user experience easy to navigate and fun as well.
A new drop-down menu system that was much simpler to navigate was incorporated in to the website. Spurs Fanatic also has a great number of social media interactions and so the website’s channels were presented in a clean, modern and sleek design. Placed above the fold and at the top of the sidebar adjacent to the latest article meant that they’re ever-present when users are navigating the site.
Ease of sharing articles for website users was also a major consideration. The ability to quickly share on social channels, along with a share count for social-proofing, was also implemented.
SEO
Key to the brief was Search Engine Optimisation to attract more visitors. This was achieved by giving all pages proper meta-data, tags and descriptions. An improved keyword structure was also put in place. Deeper internal linking was incorporated throughout the site. Furthermore, an xml sitemap was set up and submitted to Google Search Console along with a robots.txt file to improve crawl efficiency.
What’s more, optimised images and cleaner code meant faster page load times. Speed is critically important for keeping users on the site and going up the Google rankings.
Overall, the new redesigned website returned in the top three places on the first Google page for their desired search terms.
WordPress CMS
The original Spurs Fanatic website had been built on the WordPress platform and they wanted to continue with the CMS that they knew well. A big reason why they came to us.
We engineered the entire design on the WordPress back-end so that they could continue editing articles and pages with a CMS they were comfortable with.
Project results:
Professional, clean, magazine design built on WordPress CMS.
SEO increased Google organic search visitors.
Increase in overall website visitors.