Over the past several months we have seen a new trend in website designs. Back in April, Cal St. Northridge rolled out GoMatatdors.com with this new look. Over the summer, Shenandoah University and Lynn University did the same. And most recently, Assumption College launched the revamped AssumptionGreyhounds.com.

Director of Site Development Greg Blake and his team have surveyed corporate designs, attended UX seminars and seen the effect of images & videos on social media. On each site launch they take into consideration the user, its audience and most importantly, compatibility. This formula has provided us with the latest trend in athletic websites, large-image responsive designs.  

Inspiration

In past years, websites contained lots of text and graphics because we saw a need to keep content above the fold and photos were hard to come by. But today we are finding you have access to more high-quality images and videos that share the story much better, making the newspaper layout obsolete. As we see across social media platforms, videos and images drive traffic and this should be no different for your athletics website.

With this additional flexibility, we are able to create a layout that is much more attractive to the audience. After doing some research, we saw that schools are dealing with a user base that is highly visual and more technologically advanced. And the best way to attract those fans is with a website that is built around large images.    

Benefits

Over the past six months, more than 60% of the page views on your website are from a laptop, but at the same time, more than 60% of your fans are coming from a mobile device. AssumptionGreyhounds.com has seen a 66.1% increase in the number of fans viewing the website through a mobile device from October 2013 to October 2014. With this in mind, our site development team has now focused on building mobile-first as we expect this trend to continue. Those of you who are just starting out in the site launch process or have recently gone through a redesign may have noticed a new process for launching your website. Our site development team is now building your websites from small to big screens, rather than going from large (desktops, monitors) to small (iPhones, Androids, etc.).

"The Assumption College Department of Athletics and Recreation is very excited for the launch of our new website, powered by PrestoSports," said Ken Johnson, Assistant Director of Athletics & Recreation for Communications at Assumption College. "This site is the culmination of a lot of hard work and bright ideas from our coaches and administration. We are thrilled that PrestoSports was able to translate our thoughts into a clean, user-friendly site that ties all of our modern features, such as social media and video, into one place. As part of our branding process and communicating what makes Assumption Athletics special, this is a huge step for us and we couldn't be happier with the end product."  

The large-image responsive designs are extremely functional on mobile devices and, more importantly, present a visually-appealing layout on smaller screens. Back in 2009, adaptive designs were effective in providing a mobile layout, but the customization was limited. The adaptive websites were filled with text and images that were barely visible, almost completely removing any custom design. Schools can now provide a fully-customized mobile layout that is loaded with images and videos that allow them to differentiate themselves much more. No two schools are the same, so why should the websites look the same?

Consistency is crucial in delivering your content, and these designs allow that by offering more of your photos and videos on mobile layouts that otherwise would only be seen on a desktop version. The photo gallery below shows how the photos scale so they can be seen no matter what device you view them on. You can click the thumbnails to see larger images. 

Images scale to different devices