WordPress website development for a football club

FK Carnikava is a children’s football club. This project is a website for a football club whose main users are parents and young players. CREATING.LV built the site fkcarnikava.lv, and the project was handed over in 2024.

The club needed a website that reflects the club’s activities and gives parents and players the information they need: when training takes place, who the coach is, what is happening at the club and how to contact it. It was just as important that the club could update this information itself.

CREATING.LV built the FK Carnikava website from the design to the finished site. Our work covered:

• the club site’s visual design and user experience (UX);
• a WordPress website with easy content management;
• training schedules, information about the coach and a contacts block;
• a news section and a photo gallery;
• an adapted mobile version for use on a phone.

The result is a WordPress website for a football club on which the club itself updates information about training, competitions and events and adds new events and photos. The site footer names CREATING.LV as the developer.

Parents first need to know when training is. On the website, the training schedules are in one place that parents can open at any time, instead of searching old messages or asking the coach. If the schedule changes, the club updates it on the website, and parents see the current version. When planning a similar section, it is worth deciding at the start how to organise the schedule — for example, by age group or by day of the week — so that each family quickly finds their child’s training.

Information about the coach helps parents understand who works with their child.

On the current site, training information is brought together in the sections “Treniņi” (Training), “Treneris” (Coach) and “Kalendārs” (Calendar), where the training and tournament calendar shows training days and times.

The news and photo gallery were part of our delivery. The news covers club events and competitions, while the photo gallery shows club life. Parents see what the children do at the club.

At a sports club, information changes often: training times, competitions, events. The news section lets the club publish a separate dated post about each event, so parents can follow what has happened at the club recently and also find earlier news.

For competitions, parents usually need to know more than for a regular training session: when and where it takes place and when to be there. The club can publish this information in the news before a competition, and afterwards report how it went and add photos to the gallery.

Photos from a children’s club show children, and clubs usually ask parents for consent before publishing them in the gallery. In WordPress, an image can be removed from the gallery or replaced with another at any time, so a football club website lets the club act quickly if parents ask for a photo not to be shown.

The contacts block is there for easy contact with the club. It is useful both for existing club parents with a question about training and for families who want to find out how to sign their child up for the club. In the project screenshot, the contacts part shows a message form for contacting the club, and on the current site it is in the “Kontakti” (Contacts) section. The form lets people write to the club directly from the website, without opening an email program or looking for the club’s email address.

For parents, the football club website answers practical questions, and each has its own place:

• when training is — in the training schedules;
• who coaches the children — in the information about the coach;
• what is happening at the club — in the news and photo gallery;
• how to get in touch — in the contacts block.

For a new player and their family, it is also the first introduction to the club: the coach, training times and club life are visible even before the first training session.

The website is set up so that the club’s people add news, events and photos themselves in WordPress, without a developer’s help. Published information is visible to parents straight away.

In the WordPress admin, a news item is created as an ordinary post: enter a title and text, add images and publish. Photos are uploaded to the media library and can be used both in news and in the photo gallery. No HTML or programming knowledge is needed for this.

The club changes the training information in the same way when training times change. The club can publish a new tournament, a changed training time or photos from a competition on the same day, without waiting for someone else to make the changes.

WordPress lets everyone who updates content have their own user account. If the club’s people change, a new content editor can be given access and only needs to learn the same way of adding posts and images. WordPress user roles also let you set what each person may do: for example, an author can publish their own posts, while an editor can also edit content published by others.

We created the FK Carnikava site’s design, UX and adapted mobile version. Training schedules, news and contacts are also easy to use on a phone, and the photo gallery can be browsed on a phone just as on a desktop.

For a children’s sports club website, the phone version is essential: parents can check a training time or the latest news on the way or before heading to training, when a computer is not at hand.

How we work on design and usability is explained on the page Web design and UX/UI.

WordPress — a platform that gives the club easy content management and makes it simple to update information about training, competitions and club events. How we use this platform is described on the page WordPress website development.

A football club website like this also suits another children’s and youth sports club or sports school that regularly needs to tell parents about training times and events and wants to update the content itself. The same structure — training schedules, information about the coach, news, a gallery and contacts — can also be adapted for another sport.

A website for a football club or another sports club starts with what parents need to find most often: training times, contacts and news. For another sports club example — a women’s basketball club website — see the project SBK Ādaži.

• Website development
• Web design

fkcarnikava.lv

This portfolio entry reflects the solution as delivered at handover. The current website may have changed.