Blog prod

SBART Website Updates Add Efficiency, Functionality

Screenshot of SBART on tablet and phone

The updated Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table website is responsive and mobile-friendly.

For more than forty years the Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table has supported student athletes in the greater Santa Barbara area via recognition and financial support for organizations, teams, and individuals. SBART has long had a website, but in 2019 they decided to do some major home renovations.

Increasingly, web stats show more and more web browsing happens on phones. In fact, the most recent data from Statcounter shows that mobile browsing has actually edged out desktop browsing:

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Platform Comparison Market Share

Stats also show that most young people have smartphones and do most of their web browsing on mobile devices. Clearly, a website like SBART serving an audience of young people needed to do so well on a phone!

We worked with SBART to identify an attractive, responsive WordPress theme that would present the website well on tablets and phones, but that wouldn’t require us to rework the many years of content posts or the existing site architecture. In addition, we chose a theme with support for ecommerce—the other big site update.

In talking with SBART it was clear that although it was certainly possible to continue managing membership renewals, membership rosters, event ticketing with paid and comp tickets, and sponsorship payments manually, but that it was an administratively onerous process for the organization, and not that convenient for members either!

Using Stripe as the payment gateway and WooCommerce for the ecommerce platform, we set up the site to permit people to purchase new memberships or renew them; for SBART to handle their event ticketing entirely via the website, even those pesky companion and comp tickets; and for sponsors to review all sponsorship levels and make their payments via the website.

While the onset of COVID-19 has meant some of those features won’t get used right away (no events, no tickets, darn it), SBART has nonetheless been able to reduce some administrative overhead—a real advantage for a volunteer-run organization!

Comments

Have a Project for Us?

Request a Proposal