St. Edward Athletics

Project Background

St. Edward High School’s 17 sports programs are among the country’s most prestigious and competitive. The school also holds the title of the winningest athletic program in Ohio, with over 75 state titles and 11 national championships. With a strong reputation preceding them, the school looked to drastically improve its online presence before the 2023-24 school year, especially with the expectation of an incredible football season and national coverage on ESPN.

Our Approach

The old St. Edward Athletics website was not mobile-friendly, consistently had outdated information, and was challenging for fans to navigate. For the website design project, the school had three priorities:

1. Accurately display team schedules, with easy means of updating games
2. Publish game notes throughout the season
3. Streamline the ability for fans to watch live broadcasts

For this project, Spark Creative enlisted the help of three incredible marketers:

Danni Bennett — Information Architecture

​Danni Bennett is a digital marketing consultant with 20+ years of experience in user experience optimization, information architecture, business analysis, search engine optimization, and technical/marketing writing in agency and direct-to-client settings. Her clients have included GoodRx, the Federal Reserve Banks of Cleveland and New York, Medical Mutual, Cleveland Clinic, Proctor & Gamble, Cleveland Magazine, XTRA Lease, COSE, John Carroll University, Lorain County Community College, and Cleveland Metroparks.

Kayla Kogelnik — Design

​Kayla Kogelnik collaborates with her clients to create beautiful and functional designs. She has developed her skillset through projects for a variety of mediums, but her career focuses on designing best-in-class digital experiences. She gains an understanding of the brand, audience, and project goal to create effective solutions.

Erin Barr — Project Support

Throughout her career, Erin Barr has helped marketing agencies and private clients develop comprehensive marketing strategies to reach their target audiences. Her clients have realized the full potential of their digital investments by strategically integrating the website into marketing, treating it as the central component that makes all other marketing tactics successful, improving usability based on user data, and finding technical deficiencies.

Our Work

Information Architecture

The first part of the website redesign started with completely changing the information architecture and cleaning the sitemap. The previous St. Edward Athletics website had poor URL structure, irrelevant slugs for the page’s content, and organized information at the program level (e.g., the Varsity, Junior Varsity, and Freshman football teams all lived on one page).

Danni strategized the new website to have a dedicated page for each team, making the critical information readily accessible to each team’s fans. For example, the fans would no longer encounter schedules and other irrelevant details for the Freshman Green football team while on the Varsity page. The sitemap reorganization also consolidated non-team pages and included proper URL structuring for SEO.

Design

Kayla’s design balances functional design principles with the effective presentation of information. It all begins on the homepage, which acts as a hub for all the data present on the interior pages. Before scrolling below the fold, users encounter a large hero section slideshow, a foreground “knockout image” to highlight a player, and a secondary slideshow. Scrolling down, the homepage automatically displays upcoming games, with links to purchase tickets. The page also includes dedicated links to each sports team.

The hallmark of Kayla’s design is the website’s navigation, which includes a mega-menu for every sports team organized first by the season (fall, winter, and spring), followed by the program (e.g., football). The desktop and mobile versions of the website have different navigation experiences to remain mindful of screen sizes.

Kayla also designed layouts for the Coach & Staff directory and Hall of Fame, both significant improvements over the previous website’s standard on-page lists. Lastly, Kayla leveraged tab sections for the team pages to reduce the length of pages and make the amount of information to fans less overwhelming.

 

Functionality

The website includes a plethora of unique functionality that makes it the most challenging—and rewarding—websites Spark Creative has built. New features on the site include:

• A filterable and searchable directory of coaches and staff that includes every role of a specific individual rather than simple job titles
• A dedicated page that displays any upcoming game broadcast live, access links and instructions, and easily digestible FAQs for fans who need more assistance
• A callout section in the hero of each team page with the details for the next game without needing to scroll down to the schedule
• Conditional buttons next to each individual game direct users to buy tickets and immediately changeover to display the results after a game’s conclusion
• Two different layouts for each team’s schedule, based on whether a user is on desktop or mobile
• Team-specific coach directories that take the form of the larger directory of coaches and staff but only display those who work for a given team
• A filterable directory of athletic camps, which are a core component and funnel for St. Edward’s Admission team
• An overhauled Hall of Fame that not only displays the honorees but also visualizes the sports they played while at St. Ed’s

Our Impact

In the five months after launching the website in August 2023, the site had over 102,000 users and 188,000 sessions, including a huge amount of traffic dedicated to the school’s Varsity football team that won back-to-back-to-back (3x) state championships. The site received incredible feedback from St. Edward’s community, including from long-time coaches.