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How did the project start?
With the 2012 Olympics in the bag and commitment from organisations such as Sport England promising to get one million more people actively participating in sport by 2012 there has never been a busier and better time for sports clubs, organising bodies and players themselves.
We have seen this first hand with the Teesside Junior Football Alliance (TJFA), one of Europe’s larges grass roots football leagues with over 10,000 players making up around 500 teams. We are proud to say over the past three years we have worked closely with the TJFA to dramatically improve the efficiency of their back office systems and more recently the public facing website. Allowing them to go on supporting grass roots football and providing an opportunity for kids to get involved and get playing sport.
What started out as a request to fix a couple of problems on the old website soon grew into a recode of the XHTML and CSS and that was all the opportunity we needed to demonstrate to the league our passion for delivering quality work, on budget and on time. They obviously agreed and we were awarded the contract to re-develop the leagues administration system, a redevelopment which saved them days of manual processes time each week.
Most recently the TJFA asked us to look at the client facing side of the website they wanted something that really reflected the size and professionalism of the league and something the players, managers and parents would be excited to use. We got to work on the redesign in July and had it ready for the new season kicking off at the start of September. The new site has been a huge success with parents admitting to rushing home from work to see how their kid’s team is doing.
We are already working with the league to plan how we can keep growing the site in the next off season. The TJFA site is a real showcase of how we can bring technical expertise and great interface design together to deliver outstanding results for administrators and end users alike.
What options did you consider?
We are firm believers that there is no point in guessing at what the end users of a site will want, so when it came to the TJFA we did our homework. We asked the players, parents, managers and league administrators what they wanted from the website, what it had to have, what it should have and what it would have in their wildest dreams and we crammed in as much as we could.
The only thing that really had us going back and forth was just how far we could push the site. From what had been said by the players we knew that pitch side videos, match reports and photos would go down a storm but in the end it was just too much of a risk to take and we limited it to the match reports.
It was a real shame we couldn’t get everything in but on the positive side it means we have some great additions we could implement for next season.
What help and expertise did you receive?
We’re a proud bunch here at Thap and we don’t often ask for help but the TJFA league is so big unless you’re dealing with it every day you just can’t get your head around it. So we did the sensible things and spent a lot of time with the administrators going through the intricacies of the league.
We also have to acknowledge the input we received from the players, managers and parents. The input and feedback we received was an essential component in producing the league website and without it we wouldn’t have been able to produce the site we did.
Did you face and challenges or learn any lessons?
There is an element of learning in every project we do and not just in terms of technical ability or project delivery but also in terms of truly understanding the client. We know that if a project is really going to deliver we need to know more than just what the client is asking for, we need to dig a little deeper and find out what really makes them tick.
For the TJFA the challenges came from two fronts, what features we needed to introduce to the site to keep everyone happy and how we could create a system robust enough to handle the complexities that come with a league the size of the TJFA without it being intimidating to the administrator.
The answers to both problems came from asking the experts themselves, the players, managers, parents and league administrators. Ultimately we learn a lot about providing systems that could deliver real benefits to the users whether they were at the user or administrative side of the site.
What are the outcomes and how has it improved your business?
We can hold our head up high and say the TJFA website has been a resounding success. The feedback from players, managers, parent and the league administrators has been excellent so much so that FIFA personally contacted the league secretary to comment on the site.
The league site is now brining teams closer together and giving them a real sense of ownership of the site. Experimental ideas such as the math reports have surprised everyone with their popularity and the website statistics back the feedback up, the site is bringing more users in, keeping them on the site for longer and has them exploring the site deeper.
The end goal was to deliver a site that was more in line with the professionalism and size of the TJFA and no one is in any doubt that we have managed to achieve this. For us it has given us a chance to showcase our interface design abilities as well as our technical capacity.
As with all of our projects we don’t see this latest development as the end, we are already sketching ideas for what we can do next summer to take the site and the league forward.
What are your plans for the future?
We are really proud to have the clients we do and we have great relationships with all of them. We’ve worked with the TJFA for the last three years and we only see the relationship going from strength to strength. The TJFA are passionate about grass roots football and we are committed to doing all we can to support them through the development of their website.
As far as our own future goes we are keen to stick to our core foundations, producing high quality work on time and on budget for clients we are just as happy sharing a beer with as developing web applications for.
Internally our ambition is to carry on growing the company without sacrificing the close team feeling we have through an increase in the services we provide and the size and number of projects we handle.
As part of our continued growth we have begun to create spin out companies from internal ideas. Our first spin out idea, Who Can Play, is already proving a success having secured investment from North Star it is now being tested by the TJFA before its formal public launch.
It’s an exciting time for us at the moment, we have great clients with exciting projects and a hugely talented team of developers and interface designers with the in house ability and passion to deliver supporting services from online marketing to collocation hosting.
