The following is a post that I have preserved in its original form. It was the 3rd of 6 posts that I created for a computer science class at Northwestern.
In our 3rd and 4th classes we briefly discussed what it would be like to create a site structure for a professional sports team. While at first this was difficult, we soon learned that we could write out sentences that could help us divide up the website based on what we would want to know. For example, imagine an advertisement posted by the team:
“Manchester United’s next game will be against Brighton and Hove Albion on Friday, May 4th at 2:00PM CT at Falmer Stadium. United will be playing for 2nd place in the Premier League, so make sure to order your favorite player’s shirt now so that it arrives to you in time for kickoff!”
Given that this advertisement is directed a user that the club considers to be their own, we can unpack these two sentences to see what relevant information it contains, and whether it could be broken into separate categories. For emphasis I have highlighted unique pieces of information below:
“Manchester United’s next game will be against Brighton and Hove Albion on Friday, May 4th at 2:00PM CT at Falmer Stadium. United will be playing for 2nd place in the Premier League, so make sure to order your favorite player‘s shirt now so that it arrives to you in time for kickoff!”
Out of these two sentences, I can begin to list information that I should provide on the team’s website. Visitors to the website will want to see who the next opponent is. They will want to see what time they are playing, and whether the game is home or away. They will want to see up-to-date Premier League standings, and where the team falls in the standings. They will want to order a new jersey online, and they will probably want to see player profiles where they can learn more about individual members of the team.
Given the above, we could build out entire categories for Next Match, Standings, Shop and Player Profiles.