Football club website with KNVB data

For a local football club I got to build a new website. For a club like this, a good website is more than a digital business card: it's the place where members, parents, referees, and supporters meet around everything that a week of training, matches, and activities brings.

I started with the club's own information needs. What needed to be easy to publish each week? Which information were members looking for most often? What had to happen automatically as a minimum, and what should remain deliberately manual because the club wanted an editorial role in it? Only after that did the technology come into play in earnest.

One of the biggest challenges was the integration with the KNVB data service. Schedule, results, standings, and match reschedules — we didn't want to retype any of that by hand, because too much changes too often at too many levels. I made sure the data was integrated smoothly, with a setup where KNVB updates automatically land in the right spots on the site, while the club could still intervene where needed (for example with their own additional info on a match).

The integration also had to be robust against the fact that external services are simply not always available. A KNVB outage shouldn't take down the site. We built in caching and clear fallback behavior so that during a dip at the data source the site still shows the latest known state — with an honest signal that the last update is a bit older now.

I also put a lot of attention into the design of the website. A local football club benefits from an interface that does the right thing immediately: quick navigation to 'my team', 'upcoming matches', 'standings', and 'news', with large readable text that also works on a phone next to the pitch. Bootstrap and jQuery helped land that quickly and neatly in the stack of the time.

Behind the scenes it ran on Silverstripe combined with WordPress for specific parts, and PHP. A pragmatic combination: use whatever fits best per piece, as long as you make one coherent experience out of it for the end-user. Proud of the result and glad to have contributed to the club's digital presence.