The Auburn Ski Club (ASC) has been coaching and supporting snow sports near Northern California’s Boreal Mountain Resort since 1928. In Summer 2023, the ASC Training Center reached out to Dedicated Designs to design a front end visual brochure website that would act as a gateway to their updated Customer Relations Management (CRM) programming, encompass their current organizational structure, and give them a new and exciting online look.
The new landing page for the ASC Training Center.
Throughout this project, the ASC Training Center wanted to address the lack of website navigability and modernization on their website. Most importantly, the site had to function as a tool for facilitating program and team sign ups, communicating important facility and weather updates to current users, advertising the various program areas, and hosting important information about each program area.
Building New Homes for Existing Links
Before their partnership with Dedicated Designs, the ASC Training Center had been transitioning from their pre-existing CRM system to a more advanced system specifically catered to winter sports processes. This means that, rather than building a whole platform from the ground up, the Dedicated Designs web team needed to create a front-end gateway that could seamlessly integrate into the ASC Training Center’s new and improved ASC system, while also relocating important links and information from the legacy CRM. To guarantee this transition went off without a hitch, the Dedicated Designs developers created new homes for each hosted hyperlink, moved all important front-end documents, and checked for accuracy and functionality throughout the almost 40 individual web pages that make up the site as a whole.
This portion of the project was particularly detail oriented – and absolutely crucial in ensuring that the website could be used as the tool that ASC needed for their snow team logistics.
Making it Easy to Navigate & Find Information
One of the main challenges the client wanted to address was the lack of navigability on the legacy site. To address this issue, the Dedicated Designs team incorporated human centered design principles into the new front end design to make it easier for users to find the information they needed.
A large part of this effort included intuitive organization. The new site was organized by the four main activity categories (Alpine, Biathlon, Nordic, and Snowboard), but also included a landing page for all upcoming Events and Races, and the About and Donate pages.
The dropdown menus throughout the site made navigation intuitive for all site users.
With so many different pages in one website, the Dedicated Designs team was incredibly intentional in incorporating user-experienced focused design into each page and connection. Following these principles, each page of the new website was intuitively designed to encourage easy navigation, and the site leveraged buttons, images, and a number of drop down menus to display information in an easily digestible manner. Additionally, mobile-friendliness and accessibility were a large focus for this build as many visitors might need to access the website on the go or on ski trails.
The footer of the ASC Training Center site also contributes to the overall ease of use of the website as a whole, especially within the information finding aspect of team coordination. Many of the coaches at the ASC Training Center were managing multiple teams at the same time, each containing a wide array of athletes. They needed an easy-to-find, consolidated space on their site to host important information.
The ASC Training Center website footer.
Dedicated Designs worked with the client accordingly to create a footer that filled all of their needs. Containing contact information for the center, hyperlinks to all program areas and social media accounts, expanded leadership information, and additional legal and safety documents, the footer acts as a convenient consolidated resource for all site users.
Catering to Client Specifications
The ASC Training Center was made up of four main snow sport categories, including the Alpine, Biathlon, Nordic, and Snowboard teams. Before working with Dedicated Designs, the staff in each category had specific conventions for the ways in which they ran their sign ups and organized their information on their legacy system.
The Dedicated Designs web team worked diligently to create landing pages that were uniform across the website, but also catered to each coach’s specific needs and prior preferences. This process involved working hand in hand with multiple client stakeholders to ensure that the new look, feel, and functionality of the website would cater to their specific goals, while also appearing cohesive across the site as a whole.
The landing page for the Alpine program area.
To ensure even greater client satisfaction, Dedicated Designs worked to customize the drop down menus and related pages for each category. As users navigate through the site, they will notice that each drop down varies to accommodate for the specific needs of each snow sport.
Building Client Relationships
Because the website acts primarily as a tool for the various snow sport areas, it was important that the Dedicated Designs team worked hand in hand with the client throughout the process to ensure that the website worked exactly as requested.
To make sure all client needs and preferences were heard – and all questions were answered – our team at Dedicated Designs held routine meetings and communicated frequently with the clients. Keeping a line of constant communication open between the client and Dedicated Designs guaranteed that all parties were always collaborating – and that Dedicated Designs was building a front end that would work exactly to the client’s specifications and timeline.
Training for Continuous Understanding and Use
Throughout each new season, the snow team coaches needed to be able to update the information on each of their pages. With that use in mind, the ability of each coach to independently update their own pages was a feature the clients specifically requested and prioritized throughout this process. To ensure that all of the ASC clients could continue to leverage their site and cater it to their specific needs, the Dedicated Designs web team set up the site to be easily edited by the clients themselves.
In addition, our web team made a concerted effort to train the clients on the website and its functionality to guarantee they could independently operate the website far past the project end date. Not only did the web team lead the client through live, personalized training, but they also created and recorded a number of training videos for the clients to reference as they learned how to edit their portion of the website.
Throughout this process, the Dedicated Designs team worked with the client and addressed specific concerns to make sure the client was completely comfortable with using and updating the platform before wrapping up the project as a whole.
Launching ASC’s New Website
Over the course of a few months, Dedicated Designs worked with the ASC Training Center to completely redesign the front end of their website, ensuring that it was completely compatible with their pre-existing CRM – and that the users could customize it for their own use long after the contract had concluded. If you’re interested in working with us to create a similar front-end solution for your CRM processes, reach out to Dedicated Designs today.
