Creating and Maintaining an Athletic Web Site 2.0

About a decade ago, I had an article published in Interscholastic Athletic Administration entitled “Creating and Maintaining an Athletic Web Site”.  I recently stumbled across the text while cleaning out my office, and I was dumbfounded to think about just how much had changed with this topic in the last 10 years.  (I was also amazed that the photo of me in the article looked as if it was taken when I was about 14 years old.)  Out of curiosity, I tried to locate the article online today, and it was nowhere to be found.  Alas, the piece is to be forgotten forever, perhaps with good reason since a majority of the content would be woefully out of date today.

Ten years ago, high school athletic departments were struggling with the best way to just get online and promote their programs.  Coaches and athletic administrators are not always the most current with technology, and they rarely have a professional background in public relations.  Nonetheless, today a static web site is a given for an athletic program.  The next “new world” for schools to discover involves the use of team blog sites, Twitter, and Facebook to connect with athletes, fans, alums, and the surrounding community.  School calendars with athletic schedules can now be downloaded into smart phones allowing parents to stay current with their child’s schedule at the push of a button.

While the main focus of most any high school is academics, it is the athletic web site that attracts the most attention from the outside world.  In a recent audit of our own web site here at the Westminster Schools in Atlanta, we discovered that our athletic web pages received more hits from off campus than any other section of our school web site.  As a matter of fact, athletics received more hits than academics, the arts, development, and alumni pages combined.  Part of the lure of the athletics section of our web site is that it is personal to so many people.  Our parents want information about the programs in which their child participates (and parents from other schools want to see the programs against which their child will compete).  Another big part of this is due to that fact that our athletic web site has the most amount of content, and the content is constantly changing.

Thanks to a friend of mine, I recently learned how to use an RSS feed to follow updates to a website.  I watched a four-minute video and with a few additional minutes of trial and error on Yahoo, I was following my first site, ESPN College Football News.  My personal victory suddenly seemed less exciting when I realized that we did not currently have this same capability attached to the athletic web site that I manage during the day.

Now that I have managed our school athletic web site for over a decade, I look back at that article I wrote in 2002 with the thought that I was actually too focused on the details and missed the big picture.  With new online programs and applications appearing seemingly every few months, it is easy for a school’s online presence to get overextended.  However, regardless of the apps or site(s) being used, there are three simple ideas that I think schools should keep in mind when managing their online and digital program presence.

1.  Be Relevant – Provide information that people want in a format that is easy for them to access.  Provide content that is unique to your school – current athletic schedules, directions to off-site athletic venues, departmental protocol for inclement weather, and school health forms are just the tip of the iceberg.  If you want alumni and fans in the community to check your site for athletic scores and results, then they need to be posted online as soon as a contest is complete.  If users can get the information quicker on the web site for your neighborhood newspaper, that is where they will go.

2.  Be Authentic – Make sure your content speaks to the target audience.  Promote your teams in a way that reflects the goals and missions of your athletic program.  Do you over promote a specific program more than others?  Are boys teams provided more publicity than the girls?  Do you celebrate only big wins or championships or do you find ways to highlight the accomplishments of your teams that may not be reflected on the scoreboard?

3.  Be Consistent – An athletic director does not have to worry that their department web site, Twitter feed, and Facebook page all get updated every single day of the year, but you can no go “gung ho” on information for a week and then disappear for the next two.  I followed the Twitter feed for a school for a football game two weeks ago to stay current with the score.  The manager of the account posted updates of the score at the end of the first, second, and third quarters.  Hours passed before I realized that I was not going to get a final update.  I just assumed that the team had lost the game (people tend to become less enthusiastic about posting less than positive information about their teams or programs).  Nonetheless, the inconsistency in the message I was receiving made me much less likely to want to check their account again in the future.

In the collegiate world, much of this is made easier for athletic departments by the presence of a Sports Information Director.  Such a position rarely exists at the high school level although there may be a coach or administrator who assists with some of the functions of that job.  The separation of the athletic department from the communications office can lead to greater inconsistencies in the intended message.  Relevancy, authenticity, and consistency are made tougher when the person delivering the message is outside of the world of athletics.  On the plus side, high school AD’s have supervision of an SID taken off their plate.  However, it is the role of the effective athletic administrator to be proactive in seeking out the information “gate keeper” at their school in order to establish standards for information that are consistent with their own departmental goals.