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By Michael Burns & Carita Weaver, Partners i5 Web Works
With the coming athletic New Year and New Coaches in Football and Basketball, the Carroll Athletics Boosters Club needed a new look for their website: www.carrolldragons.org. Their previous site had served its purpose for years, providing a location for the many exploits of the various Carroll Dragon championship teams. However, they – and the many Dragon Nation visitors to the website – decided the time had come to update the website with not only a new look, but increased functionality, greater focus on each sport, more images and the addition of video – the most popular page on the website. The new website launched in October 2007 to the cheers of many in the Dragon Athletic community.
Jack Luna, President of the Carroll Athletics Booster Club, told the website developers that to be a dragon “It takes the determination and the drive needed to succeed, no matter what the venue.” The website was just another venue in which success was expected.
Spurred on by Jack’s drive to succeed, Southlake residents Carita Weaver and Jim Bowman, co-founders of American Boosters – a Southlake design and development company for athletic websites – led the design team with the task of laying out the pages to take advantage of every space, knowing that they had to feature one sport and highlight the other active sports. They did this by using the eye-catching, action packed photos from REB Photos to highlight the top sport of the week, and by including directional areas to focus the eye on the three other top stories of the week. For example, this past November, state finals for Dragon Football were being contested, the new season of boys and girls basketball had begun, and the successful Carroll Girls Cross Country Championships were taking place in the same week, each vying for the top spot. The design team knew they would have not one championship team to track, but several, and needed to allocate space for each of them.
When you visit the new Dragon website, you will see the new look with Dragon colors, images and of course, interesting articles about Dragon sports and athletes written by both professional contributors, such as Zack Warner of TheSouthlake Journal; and moms, dads and students, who submit stories and game photos. Many of the coaches have been actively involved, providing statistics, updates and videos for their sports. “The Dragon community is very involved with every aspect of the website and have been instrumental in the development of the features and articles”, said Carita Weaver. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, the visitor can see and use the Dragon Calendar with all the upcoming sporting events and locations.
Has the site been successful? More than 100,000 visitors like you, say yes. Half of the orders at the Dragon Shop are ex-Dragons who have relocated or Dragon “want-a-bees”, who want hats, shirts and other items with the Dragon logo on them. Moreover, while many of the visitors are local to the immediate area, as you would expect, the Dragons are very popular around the entire state of Texas, throughout the U.S. and Internationally. It would seem we have two America’s Teams in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.
Michael Burns and Carita Weaver are founding partners at Southlake based i5 WebWorks a website design and re-design business established in 2001. As the Southlake Chamber’s 2005 Small business of the year i5 specializes in e-commerce, e-learning and search engine optimization.
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