I've just emailed the following to Paul King, assuming his email address is Paul.King@salfordreddevilvs.net
TLDR: For those not interested is the whole email. here are two links (you'll likely need to access them on desktop):
Redesign ideas for the club website.
Hi Paul,
I’m a lifelong Salford fan, born in ’84 and watched my first game in ’86, and I was extremely disappointed with the new website. There are so many issues with it, not issues that require a lot of user testing to discover, simply issues that are easy to spot with the eye, I found it unbelievable that a web company would put something so poor out ‘live’ to the public. Then I read the IMG criteria, noticed the points in website clicks and social media, and felt I had to provide feedback. The website needs an overhaul, and we also need to consider better content and the use of social media.
I provided feedback on the website which can be accessed here (https://1drv.ms/w/s!AkqYqw5oCPwAjPFu1Fb0ZLk0NTr1Mg?e=hfVPdV).
I don’t know if you’ve already seen this, but I have expanded on it with a few more things, and this didn’t take long because, as I mentioned, it’s a simple eye test. Also, given the website is designed using WordPress, there really isn’t an excuse for such errors. Key settings, such as spacing margins and padding), fonts, colours etc are typically standardised in a single settings area, so for there to be so much inconsistency and errors, it must be an error on the developer’s part.
Further, to my original email, I did send a follow-up and never received any type of indication that it’d be read. I decided to use a spare domain to throw something practical together as a tool for advice. As I mentioned in the document linked above, I have no agenda and I’m not looking for any paid work, though I’d happily implement a site design for the club for free and show the relevant people how to look after it and input data.
I’ll give you a little background on myself and my situation before I make a few recommendations and link to a design document. I was a lecturer in computing, a course leader, a team leader, and a lead internal verifier. I grew disillusioned with the education system about three years ago and I’ve been on a sabbatical ever since. I’ve been living on savings and getting my health back in order. I’ve read over a hundred books and have done all kinds of things for enjoyment. I’ve built furniture, carried out a garage conversion, do some landscaping, built a few websites – including e-commerce and booking systems, built a bar, taught myself a few new things, and now my savings are low, I’m retraining into project management that I’ll hopefully finish in a couple of months, hence me having the time to put this website design together (three days) and having the time to implement something for the club, if they want it. If not, I’ve included everything I’ve used and even the custom code I’ve implemented onto the website so you can ask Mosaic to do it.
For the website design, I’ve used free plugins that are well maintained, the only item of cost is the Blocky Pro theme, which is only $149 for a lifetime license (though I do have access to this and other pro plugins I could give to the club for free). I’ve used the following:
• Blocksy Pro theme - $149 for life
o Excellent theme with lots of features that mean you don’t need additional plugins. It has built-in google fonts, a cookie notice, a mega menu (covered in the design document) and hooks (also covered in the design document) among other things.
• Sports Press free edition.
o The free edition is enough for the club’s needs, this is a popular and well-maintained plugin. It has more features than what I’ve implemented in this design. I’ve used it for league tables, player lists, events, and venues.
• CoBlocks
o Free plugin, maintained by GoDaddy, which adds extra desi tools to the editor – I’ve used this to layout posts on the home page and for the merchandise carousel.
• I’d also install Rank Math free for SEO, it’s plenty good enough.
And that’s it. I would also recommend switching to SiteGround for hosting. I see that the club uses Google, and they are a free one-year deal but I’m unsure of their ongoing costs, but SiteGround offers well-priced hosting and some excellent features:
• A free plugin called SiteGround Optimizer. This help speeds up the website and provides a lot of functions, like the very popular paid plugin WP-Rocket. It performs caching, image compression and image conversion to WebP (the most modern image format for the web that serves smaller files of the same quality). All of this is designed to work well with the hosting and, if the club implements WooCommerce, it works with that out-of-the-box too.
• A free plugin called SiteGround Security – this is not a full security plugin like Wordfence (that I can give you access to for free and I use to block connections from various countries, such as Russia) but works well in its own right against brute-force attacks, data leaks, and common exploits with WordPress. It does the following:
o Hides WordPress version, which the current site doesn’t.
o A custom login page instead of the default, which the current site doesn’t)
o The option for two-factor authentication, disabling common usernames, disabling the theme and plugin editor in the main interface, and properly locking system folders – I’m not sure if any of these are done on the site but they should be.
o There are other options too.
• SiteGround also has its own WAF (We Application Firewall) outside of your site as another line of protection.
• There is a staging area—allows a clone of the website to test new design features etc before making it live.
• Excellent daily backups that are super easy for anyone to make use of—this is often a paid extra feature.
• Plus, the other things you expect like email and a free SSL certificate
• They also recently implemented their own CDN meaning there is no need to set up something like Cloudflare.
Here’s the link to the design document:
1drv.ms/w/s!AkqYqw5oCPwAjPFwOXoQAcuiL1ryfA?e=3HL7I1
A few other things the club could consider to increase website visits and appeal to a wider audience on social media are the following:
Create a forum for the fans. We currently use DevilTalk as an unofficial forum and it’s an excellent place for fans, so speak to them before trying to usurp DevilTalk, but I’m sure they would see the benefit to the club and the moderators may consider moderating a new forum. Also, given it would be run via the club website and promoted via social media we should see an increase in members. Either way, a forum will bring people to the site daily and increase visits.
o A good option is bbPress, it’s free and a sister project to the main WordPress so it is well-maintained and 100% compatible.
Utilise RSS feeds to increase news content posted to the club’s site and social media. In my design I’ve left news as one ‘catch-all’ but it could be categorised. There are plugins that you can use to find content from other sources and post them to your own news section and to social media, without anyone having to lift a finger. For example, you could pull news directly from the Super League, RFL sites or NRL sites. Also, Total RL and other RL focussed news outlets. You could also pull in video content from good quality RL focussed YouTube channels and audio content from podcasts. These can be posted in full or as excerpts with a link back to the original outlet (there is a link either way). The advantage of this is increased RL news content on the website which is auto-posted to social media. As I mentioned this could all be automatically categorised. You could have a category for Salford and, on the homepage, only show Salford news, which is better for us as fans. But in the actual news section, there could be a bunch of categories. There is also a plugin that can delete these news articles after say, 30 days so that the site keeps all Salford posts but removes anything not specifically Salford after 30 days.
Another feature the club could consider it to sell tickets directly. I don’t know what Ticketmaster charge, or if they charge anything, but I assume they take a cut. There is a plugin called Tickera, which I haven’t used myself but have heard about. It’s $99 a year or $399 for a lifetime license. With it, you can sell tickets directly from the Salford website bypassing Ticketmaster. Customers will receive tickets with a QR code that can be scanned via an app. These versions come with access to all of their add-ons (24 in total that can expand the plugin’s capabilities). The key aspects are:
• Selling direct, obviously
• Seating charts
• Integration with Mailchimp (if you use Mailchimp which is very affordable and potentially free depending on the number of subscribers to your emails, if also great for categorising users so you can better target emails)
• Specific display of terms and conditions
• Role-based pricing
• CSV exports
• Automated emails for purchases
• Built-in calendar automatically populated with events that tickets are created for
• The other great thing is that you don’t need an internet connection if one isn’t available. You can log in to the app while connected to the internet and it’ll download all the information, then you can go offsite and still scan tickets.
The technical bits are obviously a bit more complex, but the beauty of WordPress is that there are so many plugins that are advanced and well maintained that allow you to add functionality without any expert knowledge. You can also build a site that doesn't require any outside help to maintain and update, at least not continually anyway.