Basketball.org Redesign

Please check out the redesign we did on Basketball.org. I’d love to hear any feedback anyone has, good or bad.

We moved the site over to the WordPress Thesis Theme, which we continue to use more and more. Thesis is really an incredible theme and has a massive following and support group. If you have built more than one WordPress site, I suggest you check out Thesis for any new sites or upgrades.

Besides the theme change and update of the design, we also launched several new content sections and technology additions. They include, but are not limited to:

• Skills Section – This is a growing directory of how to type pages for learning correctly basketball skills that those learning the game can use. For instance, to start off, we released a skills page on How to Shoot a Basketball
• Drills Section – A list of both team and individual drills organized by category (ie. Rebounding Drills) and age (Youth, Middle School, High School)
• Courts finder – We are continuously adding courts to this section, we you can browse or search for local courts to play at.
• Foursquare – We included Foursquare into the individual Courts pages quite heavily. Viewers can see who the “Mayor” is of that court, tips from other users on that court, and also who it presently at the court (who has checked in within the last 3 hours).
• Facebook – Besides the fan box on the side, where our Basketball page continues to grow rapidly, we also removed the WordPress comments to use Facebook comments instead for blog and other discussion-type articles. It is a great viral tool as any comments left can optionally be pushed to the users Facebook profile as well.
• Youtube and Flickr – We have created groups and playlists within these video and photo sites to feed the individual Courts visual media sections. You can find these within individual Courts pages.
• Gear Section – We used Amazon to embed an affiliate store within the site, providing full access to any basketball related equipment

Lastly, we have started a monthly mailing list for Basketball.org, where we will review the updates done each month, recap top stories, and add in other tidbits of stats, quotes, and coaches tips. This newsletter is highly recommended for the casual basketball fan or player who may not want to follow the blog RSS on a daily basis, but still wants to keep basketball flowing through their blood and inbox.

Please let me know what you think!

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