Your Football Club or Academy’s Digital Presence
If you are running a sports club such as a local football team or academy, you probably know that a website can play a central role in the various activities of your organisation. A website helps people find you on the Internet and allows you to present information about your club such as your latest news, your contact details and useful information for club members. Your website is your property. It is a trusted source of information for all your members or individuals looking to be in contact with your organisation. Essentially, a website helps you communicate with your community of fans, players and parents in a digital way.
While some information on your website rarely changes such as, for example, your organisation’s history, values and contact details, there is other information on your website which regularly needs to be updated. Maybe you want to inform your community about the latest events which your club will be organising and remove the information about past events. Or maybe you need to communicate an important update about the registrations at the start of the season or the cancellation of a training session because of snowy conditions.
Whatever the exact reason may be, it is clear that owning a website where you are able to create and update information for your organisation in a simple, cheap and time-efficient way is essential. And WordPress is an excellent solution to consider for this.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a content management system (CMS) which allows you to easily build modern-looking websites and website pages that work both on desktop and mobile devices. According to Barn2.com, more than 455 million sites in the world use WordPress, with over 2 million downloads every year, making it one of the most popular ways of creating a website still today in 2022. WordPress is what is called an “open-source” software which means that many developers from all over the world work-together to make WordPress better and contribute new functionalities that it offers. But why is WordPress a good choice for a football club or a football academy?
Why WordPress is a good choice for your club
There are several reasons why using WordPress to build the website of your football organisation may be interesting. But the three most compelling reasons are:
- It’s fast to setup for your club (you can create a new website in a few days)
- It doesn’t cost a lot of money (it is very cheap to create and maintain)
- WordPress allows you to change the content on your website with practically no coding knowledge.
A quick setup
Creating a new website for your organisation using WordPress can be done in a matter of hours. One of the reasons that WordPress is so popular around the world is because it is easy to set up without needing to know how to code. Setting up WordPress can be done by following the instructions on the official website or an even easier solution is to use the automatic installation setup which is offered by almost all of the largest hosting companies such as Hostgator.com or Belgian hosting services such as Combell. A hosting service is needed in order to store all the files and media (images, videos, …) which make up your website. Because WordPress is so widely used, it also means that there are tons of resources available and free videos on YouTube helping you learn how to make WordPress work for you. This means that you can create your own website quickly and you do not need to wait long to start creating your website’s pages.
Cost-effective
It is also very cheap to create a website using WordPress. To create your website, the only costs which you need to spend money on are your website domain name (the name of your website such as www.oxasport.com) and the hosting service such as Combell or Hostgator where you pay a small monthly fee to keep your website available on the Internet. A website domain can cost around 7 to 15 euro per year. Website hosting costs range from 6 to 20 euro per month. This means that you can have your very own website for your football club or academy for less than 200 euros per year.
That is much less than hiring a web agency or a freelancer to create a website for your club. And even if you did hire someone to build your website, you would need to buy a website domain and pay for hosting in any case. Creating your website club’s yourself using WordPress also means that you will understand how the website is set up and will allow you to know how to make changes to it. WordPress is very intuitive and easy to understand. In addition, knowing how to modify the content of your website by yourself will make you independent in the long-run and you will not need an agency or freelancer and pay an hourly rate for any modifications, no matter how small, which can often be expensive.
No coding required
WordPress is specially designed to help create websites with virtually no knowledge of coding being required. Once the setup of WordPress is done automatically thanks to your hosting service, you can immediately start creating new website pages and adding content can simply be done by clicking your mouse and dragging and dropping elements. Because it does not require coding, you can easily change what your website looks like and the paragraphs, texts, images on your website’s pages efficiently. This means you gain a lot of time and you are in control of what your website looks like. This is one of the main reasons why WordPress is so popular and used by so many around the world. And if you need any help with WordPress, you are sure to find experts in your community that can lend a hand!
Final remarks
Creating a new website when you have little experience can be daunting. But, WordPress is one of the most cost-efficient and easiest tools to use. Also, because it has existed for many years (since 2003 to be exact), it has been tried and tested by many people before you and the system has only been improved and made easier to use as years have gone by.
Apart from being quick to set up, cheap and requiring no coding knowledge to use, there are several other interesting reasons why WordPress is a great solution for creating a website for non-professional football clubs and academies. Let us know if you liked this article and we will cover other benefits of WordPress for football clubs and academies in one of our next articles.
