The Sin City Shootout is the largest annual non-profit LGBT sports festival. As of August 2013 sixteen separate events had joined the festival. In 2011, I was tasked with designing the site on an extremely limited budget with the requirement that it be content managed for easy updates. The client and I worked through a few options and decided to use the SquareSpace system for the site.
The festival needed an affordable way to allow registration, not only for individuals but for entire teams as well. With the budget being what it was, we opted to use a Zoho database in conjunction with PayPal. While the system is not perfect, it meets the needs of the festival, and more importantly the budget.
As the festival has grown so has the needs of the site. The addition of so many different sports created an issue for visitors to be able to find their event quickly. After brainstorming with the event coordinators, we decided on creating a colourful secondary navigation with all the events listed as icons. While this is outside the standard template’s prebuilt code, it was relatively easy to get up and running, is is much loved by the sporting events teams.
The design and functionality has reached its limited and in June 2014 a new website design and logo were proposed. The proposal included moving the site to the more robust WordPress backend. It was to have a better registration database, advanced ad placement and tracking, and would have included some new features for attendees. Unfortunately the board ultimately decided against the update and opted to maintain the existing website themselves.
