In 2018 RSLs owner was frustrated with RSL.com’s ability to show all three teams content easily. MLS said the sites were built to only be about one team; but with the expansion of USL and NWSL, Real Salt Lake now had three teams. DLH asked me to build a shell of a website that would host all the team’s content and then from there you could be directed to the specific information for each team.
The goal of this site was to take the most important items (tickets, news, and schedule) and highlight them on this new site.
I developed this site as a prototype to show DLH. It hasn’t been through a designer yet and was just made for functionality. I developed it to mimic ESPN’s app (see image right) which is really a clean, card-based style. Each team has its own card with the top 5 news items.
The news items pull in automatically with a CRON job checking the RSL RSS feed every couple hours. The site checks for duplicates and then saves those articles to the database. The site has a CRM where you can change which team an article should appear under; but after some testing, it took too much time to go in and organize each article. So, the site reviews the URL and tries to determine which team it should belong to. For the most part, it gets it correct. Better yet, an admin only has to check it once a day at the most.
The schedule at the top of the site pulls from ESPN’s feed and show the past few matches and the next upcoming match. The ticket panel takes and CSV upload in the CMS and displays the team’s logo (hosted on RSL.com), match information, and ticket links.
The last item I was working on was a preferences button. If you click on the user icon you can choose your team preference. The site will show you team’s news feeds in the order of your preferences; with the featured section always on top.