I was approached by Val Pina and Rich Perron (commissioners of the Rhode Island Christian Basketball Association) to help them in re-branding and rebuilding their web presence. Previously, they had a simple web template and a logo based purely in text that represented RICBA in it’s inaugural year.

Several discussions were had, highlighting goals for the brand and website and also highlighting areas where RICBA failed. They wanted the revised RICBA brand to be the biggest known organized christian basketball league within five years. Moreover, they wanted the domain to be a portal where all information regarding the league could be obtained and where members and non-members alike would come to converse and share media and thoughts.

Having been given the green light to start from scratch, I attacked the re-branding process of the website from three points of view; technology, design, and usability ergonomics.

Technology:

Content management was a big issue.  With their previous site, they had no control over the content or the domain name itself.  This was solved by utilizing the power of Adobe Contribute along with Dreamweaver.  Contribute allowed both Rich and Val to edit the site without having to worry about code at all or changing anything of importance that might change how the site looked or behaved.

The site although using PHP as it’s server language takes heavy advantage of CSS and XHTML techniques.  These techniques allow for cross browser compatibility and search engine optimization of their site.

Design:

The design and look of RICBA.net went through several stages, roughly four in all to get it to the look it currently has now.  As the client put it, “Anything is better than what we had before…”  That may have been the case with the first design, but obviously we wanted to make sure that any look we finalized on was something they would be happy with five years from now.

Several things were taken into consideration such as button states, icons, favicons, backgrounds to pieces and backgrounds overall.

Usability:

Ideally, I did not want users to have to dig deep into the site to find information they wanted right away.  A lot of times, users have to go two to three pages deep to find the information needed.  On the front of the RICBA.net website, you’ll notice several important features being shown and by order of importance.

First a giant header showcasing the logo and verse of the day.

Then the mission statement, contact information, and a feed from the RICBA forum showcasing the conversations of the commissioners.  Ideally with this feed it was to be a daily bread of knowledge and wisdom.

Below all that a tabbed frame of content showcasing a media gallery, RICBA season schedule, updates from the RICBA forum, downloads from and for the league, and a team standings and statistics.

The clients were extremely excited with the way content was laid out and how all the information was presented.  Moreover, they were happy with the way their audience was reacting to seeing everything.

At the end of the day both of the clients were extremely happy with their site and the leaps and bounds that were achieved.  In less than one month the site has already had significant web traffic.  Plus a couple visits from Europe and India.  This was fun project that definately pushed me to my limits as a developer and designer.

Link: Rhode Island Christian Basketball Association

Time Frame: 2 Months