Sheffield Eagles Heritage Project.
Since the Sheffield Eagles played their first game back in 1984, there have been many highs and lows, with plenty of tales to be told. We successfully built a website that provides a platform for people to explore the rich history of the Sheffield Eagles whilst creating a medium for stories, photos and videos from the past and the present to be shared.
- Client
- The Eagles Foundation
- Who they are
- The Eagles Foundation is a registered charity with a vision of “harnessing the power of sport to make a lasting, positive impact on individual’s lives”.
- What they do
- The Foundation works in partnership with Sheffield Eagles Rugby League Club to create opportunities for people to get involved in sport, improve their wellbeing and engage in their local community.
- Location
- Sheffield
- Requirements
- A website that brings together the history of the club and the work of the heritage project, including a searchable database of player and game statistics, photos, videos, audio and articles about the club.
Problem
The Eagles Foundation wanted a website that could capture the rich heritage of the Sheffield Eagles, to provide an accessible, coherent and engaging source of information about the Club’s past whilst creating a framework for recording the future heritage of the Sheffield Eagles.
Result
We built the Sheffield Eagles Heritage Project website. The site enables The Eagles Foundation project to share the stories, photos, videos and information that they have collected to date. It also enables the site’s users to contribute with stories or interesting items relating to the Sheffield Eagles.
“It's been great to work with Hive IT in developing the website - we spent time in a series of workshops looking at who the audiences for the site could be, how we wanted to share the information and of course how it would look. They really have gone above and beyond and the website gives the project the building blocks to keep adding more and more.”Richard King, Heritage Project Officer, The Eagles Foundation
Discovery Workshop
We started the project with a lean discovery workshop to understand and explore:
- How we work together as a team
- What tools and technology we use to communicate
- The expected users and visitors to the website
- The elements, assets and architecture of the site
- The look, feel and branding
- What success looks like
Our discovery workshop with The Eagles Foundation really helped us get clear on the vision for the website and helped to inform our next steps.
Design
Using branding exercises throughout the discovery phase, we gained a deeper understanding of what The Eagles Foundation envisioned for the site.
We learned that they wanted a classic style with a twist, nostalgic and comforting like Dr.Pepper. A look that said sporty, but with class, half way between a golf outfit and Gareth Southgate’s Waist Coat.
We carried out live editing over Zoom so that we could try out different styles, with our designer quickly making changes in Adobe XD.
Development
As The Eagles Foundation required a website that could be easily customised, managed and updated - we agreed to use Sanity.io as a headless Content Management System.
We used React for the front end and hosted the site on Vercel. As the site contains a large amount of data which needs to be easily searched, filtered and surfaced, we implemented the Algolia search tool to help users easily find the information they are looking for.
It was also important to us and The Eagles Foundation that the site would be very accessible. Throughout the design and development phases, we built with the end-user in mind, ensuring that the site would meet the current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Technology
We used the following tools and technology to develop the website:
- React, Next.js - Frontend
- Sanity.io - Content Management System
- TypeScript - Languages
- Vercel - Hosting
- GitLab - CI/CD pipeline
Training and ongoing support
It has been a real pleasure working with the very friendly people at The Eagles Foundation throughout this project. We provided a training session to help the team better understand how to update and manage the site through the content management system that we built.
In addition to this, we will be available to help further in the future as part of our ongoing relationship. Finally, we’d like to say we are very grateful to the National Lottery Heritage Fund whose funding has helped make this project possible.