SBK Ādaži — website design and development for a women’s basketball club

The SBK Ādaži website is a women’s basketball club site designed and developed by CREATING.LV. The club needed a website that introduces the team and its players, shows club life in photographs and helps prospective players apply to join the team or get in touch about partnerships.

The site speaks to two main groups: girls and women who want to play basketball, and those who want to partner with the club. Both groups need a short path from first impression to getting in touch. That is why this basketball club website not only shows the team but also offers an application form and an always-available WhatsApp button.

CREATING.LV created the website design and developed the site: the structure and sections, the player presentation, the gallery, animations, an application form with server-side processing and the technical SEO foundation. The project covered both the visual concept and the programming — it is a full website development project, through to a site that sends applications by email.

The website has five sections and a separate 404 page:

• Home — a hero view with a basketball player and the slogan “Mūsu laukums. Mūsu spēle.” (“Our court. Our game.”), plus a player carousel;
• Team — the players one at a time, with a photo, name and number;
• Training and matches — a page prepared for training and match information;
• Events and gallery — photographs of club life;
• Contact — ways to get in touch, plus WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook links.

The structure is deliberately short: from the menu, visitors go straight to the team, the photographs or the contact details. The separate 404 page appears if a visitor opens an address that does not exist, such as a mistyped link: they stay on the club’s site instead of seeing the server’s standard error message.

Players are shown on the site in two ways. The home page has a horizontal player carousel that can be scrolled, and each card stops in its place (scroll-snap). The team page shows players one at a time — with a photo, name, number and a counter showing which of the team’s players is currently in view.

Both pages use one shared source of player data. If the squad changes, the data only needs correcting in one place, and the changes appear on both the home page and the team page. That way, the two parts of the site cannot show different squads.

The “Events and gallery” section brings together photographs of club life from matches and training. Images of different proportions make up a varied grid, and every photograph can be opened in an enlarged view (lightbox) with a caption explaining what the picture shows.

The section “Want to play basketball? Join us!” invites prospective players to join the club. Applications are made in a single dialog with two modes — “join the team” and “offer a partnership”. That way one form covers both goals, and the selected mode shows what the application is about.

Applications are processed by a server-side PHP script that:

• checks the completed fields;
• protects against spam with a hidden field (honeypot);
• limits overly frequent requests;
• sends the application by email using SMTP.

Email delivery has been tested for both modes. The form is complemented by frequently asked questions, a floating WhatsApp button and links to the club’s Instagram and Facebook accounts. That way a prospective player can choose the route that suits her best: fill in the form, send a message or first read the answers to the most frequent questions.

A honeypot is a form field that visitors do not see but that automated spam programs usually fill in, so the script can use this field to tell automated submissions apart from those filled in by people. Rate limiting prevents too many requests from being sent in a short time. Both techniques are there so that automatically generated messages do not end up in the inbox and genuine applications are not lost among them.

The design is based on a basketball court: court lines, the ball’s trajectory and cat paws as the club’s brand accent. Purple and dark tones, orange accents and the Archivo and Manrope fonts form a single visual language that ties all the pages of the basketball club website together in one style, while the players’ photographs and numbers carry this mood into the team presentation.

The ball shot is animated with GSAP, and the animation respects the reduced-motion setting that users can turn on on their device. This setting is usually turned on by people for whom moving screen elements make reading difficult or cause discomfort, so respecting it is part of the site’s accessibility. On a phone, the menu opens with the menu button, the header stays visible while scrolling, and the layout adapts to a narrow screen.

The SBK Ādaži website is built with Astro 4 and TypeScript and is statically generated: the pages are prepared in advance as HTML files, so no database is needed to display the content. Transitions between pages are provided by Astro View Transitions, GSAP is used for animations, and applications are processed by a server-side PHP script. View Transitions let the move from one page to the next appear as a smooth animation, even though each page is still a separate HTML file.

The SEO foundation is built into the code:

• each page has its own title, description, canonical address and Open Graph data;
• structured data — WebSite, BreadcrumbList, SportsTeam and FAQPage, which describe in machine-readable form the site, the page’s place in the site structure, the sports team and the frequently asked questions with answers;
• a sitemap, robots.txt and llms.txt — the last is a short description of the site in a text file, intended for artificial intelligence tools.

A static site has no admin panel or database that needs regular updates, so there are fewer components to maintain. The only dynamic part is the server-side application processing, and it is protected by field validation, a honeypot and rate limiting. Content changes, such as adding a new player, are made in the project data and the site is then regenerated, so when planning a site like this, you need to agree from the start who will update the content.

A sports club website like this suits clubs, teams and associations that need to show their squad and club life and accept applications from new members or partners. A static site with a single application form is suitable if the content does not need updating every day. If the club itself often publishes news, a solution with a content management system, such as WordPress, can also be chosen.

A similar sports club website can also serve a football, volleyball or hockey team: player data, a gallery and an application form are universal, but the design has to be created for each club from its own brand. More on the visual side and usability — web design and UX/UI.

• Website development
• Web design and UX/UI

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