In today’s world, your website is everything for your youth sports organization. It tells your brand’s story, houses registration, allows you to sell merchandise and equipment, and allows you to take your organization to the next level. 

Whether you’re creating your website from scratch or looking to give an existing one a revamp, the best place to start is with your goals. Are you trying to build brand awareness? Are you hoping to tell your organization’s story, or just build a place to house your programs? 

These are the kinds of questions you should be asking yourself before you begin thinking about the design of your website and the content that will live on it.

Following is a list of questions to answer before you begin building—or revamping or enhancing—your youth sports website.

Identifying the Audience for Your Youth Sports Website

There are several things you should consider about your audience when you’re revamping, enhancing, or building a youth sports website.

• Is the audience the same today as it when you built the website? Or, if you’re starting from scratch, who is the audience you want to attract? Coaches, parents, players, local busienss leaders, all of the above?
• What are the demograpics of your audience(s)? Consider, age, gender, location, and hobbies and interests (outside of youth sports).
• What are their pain points—and how can you solve them? For instance, do you run a club for girls only? If so, you are solving a pain that many parents have when trying to find a sport for their girls. 
• What content do they tend to consume? Are they podcast listeners? Readers? Video watchers? Typically, humans tend to be visual learners (67% of us!) so video works very well. But your audience(s) may get their information about youth sports programs in other ways. Find out how they consume content.
• Where do they get information about youth sports in your community? From other parents? From the schools? From flyers at Starbucks? From banners hung up in the community? Figure out all of the places they get their information and be prepared to approach your website with those considerations in mind.
• Where do they hang out—online and in real life? Is there a cafe parents go to after school dropoff or does everyone hang around on the sidewalks for a few minutes? Is there a neighborhood Facebook group or do they congregate inside NextDoor? 

Now that you have a good list of things to discover about your audience, how do you go about getting answers? Surely you can go hang out at the schools and observe, but that also might get you arrested. To play it safe, consider these options:

• Survey your current coaches, parents, and players (if they’re old enough). You can use SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, Typeform, or Jotform. You can easily ask them all of the questions listed above in an online survey. We’ve done the hard work for you!
• Interview your current coaches, parents, and players. These conversations will provide richer information and will also help you get to pain points more easily. HubSpot has a really nice piece on how to conduct customer interviews that will give you some ideas. 
• Use social listening. Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social all offer a free version of their software. Enter your organization’s name, your name, your coaches’ names, your competitor’s names, and your sport(s) + city. Having this information at your fingertips will give you a lot of great audience information.

Crafting the Goals for Your Youth Sports Website

Your audience(s) is identified and you know exactly where to reach them—and how. Now it’s time to craft your goals.

• Do you need to enhance your brand awareness? Nearly every organization on earth can use more brand awareness and more market share. If you share that sentiment, make sure your design team should make note of this and spend a little extra time on branding.  
• How important is the story behind your brand—your youth sports why? Does your organization have an interesting story to tell? How did you come to life? Is there a tradition your teammates always participate in? This might be something important for your team, and it might not. Either way, you’ll want to decide beforehand if you want to have an About Us page or place to share your mission statement in depth. 
• What types of programming do you run? Your programs are the core of your organization, and they should be front and center of your youth sports website. Helping designers understand your programs on a deeper level will help them build a site that explains this  to your customers.
• Do you sell apparel/ equipment? Selling merchandise on your youth sports website is a good way to diversify your revenue streams. If you’re already selling apparel/ equipment, adding ecommerce features to your website is a useful way to have all of your offerings in one place.
• How do you communicate with customers? Is it through email? Text message? Social media? Do you need a contact form set up on your website? Would you prefer all of the above? Having an easy way for your customers to reach you on your website is absolutely crucial. 

• Is a social media following important to you? If you’re looking to grow your social media following (which is a great, free way to attract new customers and keep current ones engaged), make sure that’s on the list for the designer to add to your youth sports website.

Are you ready to begin your journey? Connect with the LeagueApps Design Shop today to get started on identifying the audience and goals for your youth sports website. In 2021,125 LeagueApps partners revamped their brands with new custom websites. 

Our professional designers can help you bring your program’s brand vision to life by way of a stunning online experience.