TEXAS STAR YOUTH SOCCER ASSOCIATION

Two classmates and I created a fictitious youth soccer league association website named Texas Youth Soccer Association as a team project. We developed the website using Word Press. As a group we created the association’s branding as well as planning the necessary content for the website, including the game schedules, the team names and logos, and the coaches’ and players’ profiles.

I took the leadership role for this project and managed the tasking and deadline completion statuses for each member including myself. I delegated tasks according to each member's strengths as well as their desires as per their inputs based on weekly meetings both in and outside of class. I produced an Excel file in order to track all of our progress and would email weekly progress reports to the instructor as well as my team members to make sure that communication was the same across the board.

I utilized Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to craft custom logos identifying several teams’ branding. Photoshop is also my choice for web layout mock-ups during the pre­-planning stages. My text­ editor of choice is Sublime Text in which I have created a work-flow that consists of shortcut keys and code snippets which increase my productivity by 20%. HTML5 and CSS3 were the main markups used in adding any custom content that was not utilized by WordPress’ WYSIWYGs (What You See Is What You Get). Numerous pages have custom CSS in­line in order to break away from the traditional look and feel of the free templates offered in WordPress, and I also used WordPress’ CSS Editor to modify the theme’s actual CSS file.

In designing the original project, we had created custom CSS. I learned in my internship with Steadfast Creative that I needed to convert our CSS into a child theme. Producing a child theme in Word Press preserves the integrity of the custom code while allowing the website to be updated with the latest security patches and features.

Lastly we utilized a set of WordPress Plug-ins in order to provide more functionality not found in the templates offered with a free site. These plug-ins provided features such as contact forms, interactive Google Maps and even SEO best practices which ensured that our site could be found when users searched for groups such as ours.