New website for Blyth Spartans
Thursday, 13 March 2025
If you're from the North East and were asked to name the most famous non-league in the area, then Blyth Spartans would be most people's answer.
Before we tell you about what they have to do with wayfresh, let me give you a bit of background to the football club.
Founded in 1899 and being named after the Spartans of Greece, our footballing warriors take to the field at Croft Park in Blyth in their historic green and white shirts.
Blyth Spartan's most famous moment was their glorious FA Cup run in the 1977-78 season. Having already played 4 qualifying just to make it into the first round, they famously beat Stoke City away in a huge cup upset. Stoke were a Second Division (Championship nowadays) side, and Blyth won with a late goal from Steve Carney.
But they failed to beat Wrexham in the fifth round (from a dodgy retaken corner) and would have ended up playing Arsenal in the quarter-finals!
Their most recent FA Cup run in the 2014-2015 season saw them travel to play Hartlepool United, a League Two side, and achieved a dramatic 2-1 win. I remember watching this one with the bairns from the comfort of a Premier Inn!
We then led 2-0 at half time against Birmingham City (from the Championship), with goals from Robbie Dale at a packed Croft Park. With a max capacity crowd of 3,644, I have never seen the place so booncin'! Unfortunately a crazy 6 minute spell saw our opponents pull 3 goals back and they held on until the end. Still an incredibly proud moment.
They also had some amazing local results in recent years securing the Northumberland Senior Cup in 2022 for a record 22nd time. Although now retired
Now if you're a non-league football club, you're always trying to generate new funds and make cost savings where you can. Having followed the might Spartans for over 45 years and now having my own company, I decided the time was right to help out and so in 2017 the wayfresh board was unveiled at Croft Park. Yeah that's me with Jarrett Rivers and please don't judge me on my ancient scarf!
You may have noticed we have redesigned our brand since then, but still a class little board, although it has faded quite a bit now. May need to refresh it in the summer.
Most non-league clubs try and save the pennies and do as much as they can in-house and that generally includes the website too. The problem you tend to face is that it's done by volunteers, who come and go, so the website ends up being managed and tweaked by different people, none of whom are digital experts.
This usually ends up with the website becoming a bit unwieldly, slow and clunky. Fortunately at the back end of 2024 we got a call from the media team at Blyth Spartans asking if wayfresh could help take over the website.
From chatting to them they told us the main issues with the current website were:
- Too many pages for each fixture - There was a page for the match preview, away travel, match report, hospitality and gallery, so the news section was over cluttered.
- Hard to find match information - The fixtures were tucked away and it wasn't easy to find the next or previous fixture.
- Difficult to navigate - With each new volunteer taking on the website, they had their own ideas, which left the website difficult to navigate. There was literally a page for every announcement or notice and some of the pages were in the incorrect section.
- Revenue generation - Football clubs, especially non-league, rely on maximising their revenue and the website didn't really help sell this at all.
- Difficult to manage - The main issue we were told by the media team was that the site was cumbersome to manage.
- Technical issues - They had also maxed out their hosting meaning they have to delete images from their old match reports to free up space.
Here is a screenshot of the old website to give you an idea.
There was no way we could just polish the current site as a quick fix, so we agreed that a new website was the best plan. After the call we set about doing a full audit of the website, looking at what wasn't working and what the club wanted to achieve from a new website redesign. The main focus was to allow the fans to quickly and easy find all the fixtures and match reports, and also helping with some revenue generation. Any time savings in the management of the website for the media team would be a bonus.
Our a plan of action was 4 simple steps:
1. Simplifying the fixtures
The main issue we saw were in the fixtures and having 5 or 6 pages for each one was way too much. So we created a custom fixture module in our Content Management System (CMS) which allowed the media team to enter the fixture and then against it create a match preview (including the away travel) and then the match report (including the hospitality and gallery).
They could then flip between the two once the match was complete giving them one single page for a fixture which is much better for the fans to view and easier to share on their social media platforms. The fixtures also use our template system meaning they can load a preset match preview template in, then just fill in the blanks, ensuring each fixture is consistent. Photo galleries can be created in seconds by just dropping in a bunch of images and having them automatically uploaded, resized and formatted on the page.
We also included maps and directions for each away club which would automatically be added to the page giving away travel information.
2. Restructure the navigation
The website really has two distinct audiences. Fans and businesses looking for sponsorship or advertising. On the current site these two were mixed together. So we split these out into a Match Centre and Fan Zone - Everything that the fans are looking for. Fixtures, league table, tickets, club shop etc. Then a Commercial section detailing opportunities for local business to sponsor shirts, advertising boards and matchday hospitality.
3. Revenue generation
To help attract new advertisers and sponsors we included a lot more information around the club's sponsorship and advertising opportunities with pricing to clearly show prospective businesses what is available.
4. Simplified website management
We needed to make the website as simple to manage as possible for all the media team and so we integrated our custom built CMS platform allowing them to update all the fixtures, pages and announcements quickly and easily.
Once we had this plan all agreed, then we created a website visual, a representation of what we envisaged the new website would look like.
The top area of the old website was taken up by their sponsors so at first glance you weren't actually sure you were on the Blyth Spartans website. We wanted to bring in more Spartans images here so we introduced three photos showing a current player, the fans and a legacy image, which is what we feel nicely ties the club altogether.
Probably the main reason fans visit the website is to find out the fixtures. So we created a dedicated section for this next showcasing the next match (with a link to the match preview), the previous match (with a link to the match report) and then a live league table (pulled live through an API feed).
The rest of the website was restructured with dedicated sections for the fans and another section for revenue generation.
Next was the big task. Blyth Spartans had written over 5,000 blog articles going back to 2014 covering all their match reports and every announcement made in the last 11 years. We didn't want to lose any of this information, so we set about looking at how we could import it.
We managed to get a 60Mb dump of their previous database and starting the process of sifting through it. One of the main problems was that there had been a few versions of the website, so the formatting of the pages were different as we went back. We also needed to get the content and images out and then put them into our new web format too.
With a bit of help from AI to clean the data we managed to:
- Isolate all the blog articles
- Grab the raw content for each article, clean it and format it, removing any rogue code.
- Pull out all the images, check to see if they still existed. If they did then we downloaded them, resized and then uploading to our own Content Delivery Network (CDN) before dropping the new image URL back on to the page. If they didn't exist any more, then we would remove the photo from the article.
- Update any internal links to the new link format.
- Insert the article into our new CMS in the new page format.
It was a massive job, but we now have all the articles saved from the last decade for anyone who wishes to peruse the recent history of Blyth Spartans. The site was launched in November 2024 and the feedback we have had from the media team and also the fans has been amazing.
The website is perfectly created with responsive web design to work on all devices so you can keep up with all the latest scores and news on the go.
The media team immediately commented that the new CMS was really easy to use and they can now manage their whole website themselves from their desktop or even their mobile phone. With simple page creation, drag and drop features and all image automatically resized, they have found it a breeze over using the previous Wordpress site which they told us was over complicated.
We also provided training videos to help onboard any new volunteers and to reduce the learning curve.
As a fan, and as a volunteer, it's been clear for some time that the old website was in desperate need of an update. From an Admin side we were unable to alter a lot of the items on the site leading to out-of-date information. The new site not only looks great but is very user friendly. I'd like to thank Simon at wayfresh for the time he has put in to get the new site launched.
Paul Scott - Blyth Spartans Head of Media
But one thing they did love was having the support of a digital agency who they can bounce ideas off, who also suggest new ideas for revenue generation, keeping the website on course and of course looking after the technical side with a fully managed service.
As a long-time fan and advertiser I was delighted to be asked to help out with the creation of the new Blyth Spartans website. We wanted to make finding the fixtures and match reports as easy as possible and bring new ideas to get the fans more involved with the club. Working alongside the media team, we've built a platform that's simple to manage, allowing them to share information with fans more quickly. We hope this new website helps drive the club forward in these exciting times.
Simon Hawkins - wayfresh
It was amazing to work on a website for a football club I have followed since my youth and was a pleasure working with the media team.
You can visit the new Blyth Spartans website at www.blythspartans.com.
If you have an idea for a new website or would like wayfresh to help take over your old website and give it a new lease of life, then contact us today.