Do's and Don'ts of GAA Club Web Design

DO:

• DO keep a standard way of navigating throughout the whole site. If the front page has a navigation menu on the left, then that menu should appear in the same position in the same format on every page.
   
• DO have a banner across the top that includes your club's logo and name. Clicking on the logo on any page should take you back to the home page.
   
• DO make it immediately obvious how to contact your club with a view to joining.
   
• DO sell the benefits of joining your club. You do this, particularly for underage players, by emphasising photos of players having a good time as well as playing on the field.
   
• DO keep it up to date on a regular basis. If you're going to be adding loads of match reports, make sure you have a directory structure in place that will be scalable (since it will grow very quickly) and easy to maintain. Regular updates is what keeps visitors coming back to your site, and it helps to keep players and supporters interested.
   
• DO understand the difference between news and events. News items are about things that have already happened. Events are things that are going to happen at a specified date, time and location.
   
• DO remove old events from the site after they have taken place.
   

DON'T:

• DON'T be tempted to squeeze everything on to the front page. Rather than posting a whole news item on the front page, just post the headline and maybe the first paragraph. The headline should be a link to the full article that appears on a page of its own. Only show a small number of the most recent headlines and the next few upcoming events on the front page.
   
• DON'T just scan other sites and copy them, some of what you're seeing may not be good web design practice. Get a book instead.
   
• DON'T put a note on the front page from your chairman saying "On behalf of the club committee, I'd like to welcome you to our website. We hope you find it useful.... blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda..." It's too boring, irrelevant, nobody reads it, it's the sign of an amateur, and it wastes precious space.
   
• DON'T pollute a page with a load of small animated gifs.
   
• DON'T use an animated gif to represent a link to an email address.
   
• DON'T use your exact club colours as the colours of the site if those colours don't look good together on the web. It's okay to be flexible about that.
   
• DON'T let your site go stale by not updating it on a regular basis.
   
• DON'T use dark text on a dark background, or light text on a light background. If there's a bad contrast, it becomes unreadable.
   
• DON'T have fussy and complicated background images. Text looks best usually on a plain white background. The purpose is to make it easy to read, and any clutter will distract the reader.
   
• DON'T use centre-justified text for anything other than headings. A paragraph of centre-justified text is very difficult to read because the eye has to realign itself with every line. It's easier to read if text if left justified since the eye can easily remember where the start of the line is since it's in the same place.
   
• DON'T make a page so wide that the user has to scroll horizontally to read every line.
   

Recommended reading: The Art and Science of Web Design by Jeffrey Veen, available at Amazon.com.