Sportsmall

Sportsmall is a local gym that asked us for a new site in 2011. The client contact, Paul, became one of my favorite clients ever. He would email me asking me for help on the site for years after. I think it took him quite a long time to replace the site. I don’t know how much of it was loyalty to me as his favorite developer and how much was that he loved the site, but I was happy to work with a client who was so involved with his website. This particular project was also a rush because their existing host was going to be unplugged within a week of my getting the design.

One of the major things I needed to accommodate on this site was that Paul had a lot of Google Calendars with various gym events, like tournaments, scheduled. He didn’t particularly want to switch to a more native solution because of the work involved. So I had to work around that as much as possible. I also added a “shopping cart” with Paypal buttons for various donations and payments, which he needed to be able to edit himself as well.

As far as the design itself, there were a lot of minor design elements throughout that would change while you were on the site in ways that, at the time, seemed pretty cool. Now it would probably seem pretty dated, but this was before CSS animations became commonplace. For example, the tennis pro on the homepage is done with Flash, which you literally can’t do anymore because it’s so outdated. You can’t even view it on the Wayback Machine, though he is included in screenshots.

Really, I loved this client. Actual quotes include:

“Call me if I have made no sense and need clarification.”
In response to the site going down temporarily: “Famous last words. Or was the perpetrator beheaded? Nevermind, I don’t really want to know.”
“You’re a Goddess! Now hurry the F&@! up.”