Ten Years of Applecado: 2013 – Local Community Sports Clubs Directory (4/10)

TAGS TEN

To celebrate turning ten, we are skipping through our portfolio and bringing you a selection of the development projects we are proud to have worked on. This is our fourth week in the series, we’re up to 2013 and looking back at a website that encouraged local communities to participate in sports, exercise and recreation they could find around them.

Applecado are reliable and thorough Symfony developers, we’re often asked to collaborate on projects by some outstanding design agencies, and we’re a great partner for outsourcing or even whitelabel development. We worked with Alive! who designed the site and let us bring this system to life.

We were asked to build the website and partner log-in system for a local council in the UK. Sports and exercise bring tremendous health and mental benefits, and help facilitate a more active social life for many. When we’re asked to work on anything that helps bring these improvements to people’s lives – we want to get on board.

The directory was primarily map-based as maps are helpfully visual and help people understand where classes are in relation to where they live. The map had really helpful features to search and filter the classes and clubs displayed. In addition we built a calendar that also showed the listings nice and clearly in date order, for the truly spontaneous, there was a fun ‘what’s on tonight’ feature which was really well received.

Whilst maps on websites are common these days, they really weren’t back then. It was still novel, and we were still breaking ground interacting with maps, creating information-rich pop-up pins, and allowing a great deal of filtering on the map pins or results based on categories, times or age-groups for example.

Site users could find out all about a club, sports team, venue and timings offered. The site allowed anyone to register and add an activity to the map, they were then able to add all sorts of details about their organisation, where and when people could take part, and an easy way to get in touch before starting if they wanted to.

The site catered for social sign-ins, and automatically shared news of activities across Twitter and Facebook to gather a larger audience.

The website also allowed a team from the council to have full control over the content, activities, clubs and class listings and the site’s users.