Dear Teams, Own Your Site

This essay was written for the Makers of Sport® newsletter in July 2015. Monday Musings and Weekend Reads were the written editions of the newsletter that accompanied the podcast; the archived email is on Mailchimp. The newsletter's links and announcements are trimmed here.

Recently I've been thinking a lot about the business of sports and how it revolves around so many proprietary contracts. Specifically in technology. For example, some sports website companies will have clients sign up to 10-year agreements when working on their athletics websites. From a business perspective on the vendor side, this is a great business model solely for fiscal reasons because it guarantees income for 10 years. However from the team's perspective, moves like this are not a smart as web companies in sport do not appear to be innovating as fast as apparel companies like Nike and Under Armour (who also sign long-term proprietary contracts).

The modern web is a place that is full of open-source technologies. Companies in the Silicon Valley are using technologies and programming languages that are freely available to anyone on the Internet to creative innovative digital products that solve problems for users. Companies win on innovation now, not the technology itself.

With technology moving so fast, athletic organizations must be willing to iterate and innovate quickly to keep up as their fans, specifically the younger demographics keep up with new technology. They find new ways to interact with their favorite teams every single day.

As a team, when you sign a long-term contract with a company that builds your website in a potentially dated proprietary software in this age of the open-source web, you take on many risks. For example, your vendor most likely has hundreds of clients and with a software that is proprietary, if you need a custom change quickly to add or modify a feature, you most likely cannot hire a web developer to make this happen because they may not have permissions into core areas of your content management system, therefore you are forced to use the busy vendor who may not make you a priority.

In addition, we see web technologies change at a pace that can cause a 3-year old site to appear it hasn't been touched since the last decade. Consider how fast responsive design came about.

Google announced this year thatif your site isn't optimized for mobile, it will not get priority in search results on mobile devices. This is where 50% of Internet traffic comes from! When technology companies you rely on drop news like this and make such big changes to the way people will interact with your site, you must be able to move quickly in order to adjust.

In the instance of a long-term proprietary contract, your vendor may need to complete an entire redesign to make the changes needed to future-proof your site. Not to mention, if you decide to leave a company when your contract is up, with proprietary software you cannot take your site with you and will likely need a redesign when moving on from them.

As a team – not unlike most businesses – your website is a vital part of your organization's communication and the digital core of your media company. It must always be up to date and have the ability to scale when important news happens or on game day to accommodate heavy traffic. Just as banks are gobbling up technology design firms, so too should teams consider bringing full-service digital teams in-house to ensure easy transitions to new technologies and be available for quick access to troubleshoot issues or provide quick design and structural iterations to keep up to date with visual trends.

The future of the web is agile and must include decisions based on user testing to guarantee quality experiences for your fans. What are fans doing right now on your site? Are you monitoring it? How are they using it?

The web from both a usability perspective and visual perspective is constantly evolving and no longer caters to the simple solution of a redesign every few years. Outsourcing the digital core of your team's communications to companies touting proprietary, templated software and hundreds of clients is not in your best interest as a team.

So if you work for an athletics organization and are in conversations about redesigning your site in the near future, consider appropriating funds for an in-house team of programmers and user experience designers. Or at the very minimum, do the research and hire a user experience-savvy shop that provides work based on past performance, innovation and a curiosity to experiment with new frameworks and technologies; not one that forces you into a long-term contract to sit on while the digital world changes around you hour-by-hour.