The Comeback Sports Fan Website Design

The Comeback

The Comeback is a content-rich sports and pop culture website that covers everything from the NFL to the NHL to what’s playing on Netflix. With a monthly audience of over a million, The Comeback is also attracting a high volume of traffic and features a multitude of sponsors and advertisers. The website is committed to offering quality content, storytelling, and news reports, while also remaining fun and entertaining.

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The Comeback Website Project

In need of a completely redesigned website that allowed for heavy traffic, robust ad rotation, and the constant addition of new content that could be featured in a grid format and easily consumed by their audience, The Comeback came to WebDevStudios for the development of a superior user experience and ongoing support.

“WebDevStudios grasped our vision and executed on time and on budget,” says Ben Koo, Editor-in-Chief of The Comeback, “This was a major overhaul and we hit a few speed bumps, but it was way more smooth of a process opposed to previous relationships with other developers. Everyone we worked with was helpful, friendly, and proactive in communicating with us. They felt like a true partner and not hired help.”

Sports, Pop Culture, The Comeback, WebDevStudios, WordPress, Design, Development

Custom Development

Feature 5 Grid

The Feature 5 Grid is a featured content grid at the top of a web page, which highlights five popular articles from various categories. It provides an editorial staff with the ability to curate those five stories, giving them the power to create a personalized experience for each site and page in the network.

For The Comeback project, our team rebuilt the Feature 5 Grid functionality, extending it to support multiple grids, archive pages, and updated styling. These changes involved creating a new “grid” custom post type with the category taxonomy, refactoring the existing functionality into a plugin, and cleaning up the grid creation process.

Feature 5 Grid - Editorial Control

On the plugin side (in the Admin area), the grid needed to mimic the frontend view. This would allow The Comeback’s team to get a sense of the aesthetic of the grid and how images would work together. We implemented the frontend styles in an admin stylesheet and tweaked some of the proportions in order to account for any WordPress elements, such as sidebars.

Another improvement we made to the frontend of the grid was baking in accessibility. Designing a website that is accessible by all is important to us and our clients. We ensured that grid items can be tabbed through easily via a screen reader for a better overall user and accessibility experience.

Custom Development, Editorial Workflow, WordPress, Custom Plugin, WebDevStudios

Additional Ad Sections and Customized Widget

With so much traffic coming to The Comeback for the latest news on sports and pop culture, it’s no wonder that the website is not lacking in interested advertisers. The publisher needed a way to accommodate for a large amount of ads, simplify ad management, while also not disrupting their audience’s experience.

Any typical website offers advertising opportunity within the sidebar, however, The Comeback required more than that. The WebDevStudios team of developers created additional advertising space options and developed a customized widget, designed to hold raw ad code, to make it easy for their internal team to delete, add, and maintain advertisements.

Now, The Comeback has expanded advertising space, which includes the page footer, bottom page featured, top page featured, and above, below, and in between blog posts, all of which can be easily managed and controlled through the use of a customized ad widget that we developed for this client.

Custom Design

Complete Design Phase

Colorful and exciting, the new Comeback website design reflects the thrill and excitement of a sports fan website and settings by incorporating colors, images and design elements that complement the excitement of the different sports genres (NFL, NBA, MLB, etc) without overwhelming the website visitor’s experience. Our methodical design process takes our clients from sketch to launch. We do more than create a look. We connect with you and help you next-level your brand.

Our design process starts with sketches and wireframes to determine the layouts and presentation of the vast quantities of information and resources available with the goal being ease of use and responsive design to ensure anyone can reach the information they need on any device. After the initial concept, we create a universal style guide for the client’s project that provides definition and consistency for various global design elements throughout their website, such as color scheme, typography, iconography and form styling, etc.