US Sports Camps
To stay at the top you have to remain competitive
With the mantra "Serious. Fun." the folks at US Sports Camps (USSC) know a thing or two about being competitive and having fun doing so. USSC's website required a major design update in order to align it with the branding of their main sponsor - Nike.
Under the hood, a code overhaul was implemented along with a range of new features that improve page load times and ensure short and long-term competitiveness within some very popular keyword markets. Currently ussportscamps.com ranks in the top 3 and, in many cases, number 1 slot for a variety of high-traffic keyword phrases.
our role / deliverables:
Background
US Sports Camps (USSC) is America's largest sports camp company and the licensed operator of the NIKE Sports Camps. A registration hub for hundreds of camps in over 20 sports throughout North America and overseas, USSC runs a content-intensive, high-traffic website.
Customers
As USSC's primary business tool, their website's usability is crucial. The site must enable users to quickly and easily find a camp in the sport they're looking for within a city/area that's convenient, and then move them along to registering for a camp session that suits their needs. The faster this happens, the more likelihood of conversion.
Staff
Keeping a site fresh is probably the number one thing you can do to rank well in search engines and drive conversions. Indeed, USSC staff are constantly adding camps, news, and sports tips to their website, and they demand a content management system which makes these tasks easy.
Nike Young Athletes program branding
Nike provided the client with brand directives, a comprehensive set of design guidelines for us to work within to ensures the USSC website was consistent with the Nike Young Athletes program global identity.
The need for search, speed & flexibility
The previous version of their website, which we also built, ran on ExpressionEngine CMS, and while still a great CMS there were a number of reasons why we chose to move the site over to the Craft CMS platform and go to all the trouble of migrating hundreds of pages of content from one database to another in order to do so. Ultimately, search, speed and flexibility led to this move.
Finding a camp near you
A new location based search tool allows users to choose a sport and enter a geographical location, then Craft quickly finds camps that match within a 250 mile radius and displays those matches in order from nearest to farthest.
A better result
The search results page will not only show you camps that are close by, but also display programs within the sport you've selected. It's also blazing fast. No matter what you search, you don't have to wait to see the results.
Get into camp
A key step
The camp page template is the real driver of the USSC website. This is the final step before a user, hopefully, chooses a session, adds it to their cart, and moves on to the secure checkout site. Indeed, key buying decisions are made here.
What you need, where you need it
For parents, there's a lot that goes into deciding whether or not a camp is going to be the right fit for their child. To that end, all possible forms of information a parent needs to make that decision are right there in an "evergreen" sub-navigation bar, which stays with you as you scroll down the page or click on links within it to quickly jump to the content you're interested in.
A customized CMS interface makes editing content easy
With over 20 sports and more than 10 different sport managers, there's a lot of content to manage on USSC's flagship site. We used a range of custom content tabs to organize a large set of custom fields, making the editor interface simple to navigate and the task of editing content as easy as possible.
A complex site architecture
Once you dig deep into the USSC site and uncover the layers of content within the hierarchy - sports, programs, camp types, locations and camps themselves, you realize the power that Craft CMS has to make managing a large volume of content a manageable task.