Vitality Netball SuperLeague

As the elite domestic netball league the Superleague is a jewel in England Netball’s crown and plays a key role in promoting the game and its players in a season that runs from February to July each year and features eleven teams from across England, Wales and Scotland.

Working in conjunction with England Netball, the project brief placed a focus on a fast, easy to navigate website which would deliver favourably against commercial targets and would offer the opportunity for court-side officials to directly upload alive scores and match data to the site. It was also crucial that the design seamlessly incorporated lead sponsor Vitality, and took note of the largely female (just over 60%) demographic.

Data collection and the conversion of users to ticket buyers were the sites commercial drivers. This lead to calls to action around ticket purchase and newsletter sign being clearly and sympathetically blended in to the site design and layout with subscriber data integrated into England Netball’s existing CRM

As with any Sotic site accessibility was an important focus for the design and build. With pink a key component of VNSL’s branding it was important to be careful in how we used it to ensure that all information on the screen was visible against light and dark backgrounds.

In the past The Superleague and not been able to successfully and collectively gather player and team data after each game of the 20 round tournament.
We utilised the SportsPress plugin as a starting point to house data for Fixtures, League Tables, Teams and Players, with VNSL staff given an easy to use backend to generate each season’s fixtures, assign players to each team and add headshots and player details including social links.
We then created API endpoints for all data generated via SportsPress and used VueJS to create bespoke layouts to ensure that this data was presented in a way that was in keeping with the aesthetics of the website. We were also able to gain huge performance benefits by using VueJS.

This allowed us to further utilise the SportsPress framework to build our own bespoke, and fully integrated, match reporting system which allowed match officials to keep accurate records of all match data across the whole league with the scoring and player performance mapped onto the site in real time, allowing for accurate league tables, results and player performance stats.

The introduction of the new site, in 2019, saw performance significantly improve. With the efficiencies we have delivered in design and script loading meaning time to interactive is now 52% faster on mobile and 40% faster on desktop than the previous site.

We have also implemented improvements around SEO, and England Netball have seen a 12% increase in traffic from organic search in the first six months since launch compared to the same period the previous year, while site traffic also showed a significant increase in the same period (52% increase in users, 42% increase in page views and 37% increase in sessions).