A website the owner runs without me

Why I wanted it

A family-run indoor baseball and softball training facility needed close to everything a small local business needs: a logo, a brand, business cards, banners, a website, a way to update it, and a video to loop on the TVs. Underneath all of that was one goal I wrote at the top of the design: the owner edits their own site without a developer.

What happened

It took about nine months, in pieces. First the brand: a logo suite, a brick-red and cream palette, a live brand-guide website with downloadable files, cards, flyers, field banners, QR codes. Then a website, first as a static design, then rebuilt so that the fast public site stays fast while the owner edits every word, photo, coach profile, class, and blog post in an admin screen I stripped down and rebuilt so they cannot get lost in it.

The content types are the ones the business actually has: coaches, classes, memberships, and per-day holiday hours. The owner keeps a list of holidays, each one marked closed or modified hours, and the site announces them by itself. Saving anything rebuilds the live site by itself.

Then a three-to-four-minute silent looping video for the screens around the facility, designed in four “pods” so the loop point is invisible.

The bugs were the human kind. Coach headshots were cropping from the top and cutting off faces. The coaches page crashed on a draft coach with no name. A class started a day early because of a timezone.

I deliberately did not rebuild the booking and payment system. It already worked.

What it looks like

Screenshots of the site show real coaches, who have not been asked, so none here yet.

What’s next

Two ideas on paper that have not been built: a “smart” batting cage that gives hitters coaching cues on a touchscreen, entirely offline, and a way for parents’ phones to stream a youth game from several angles at once. Both are specs, not products.