YAYSL’s new site is not only much easier to use and much more attractive than its predecessor, but also displays more valuable content.
A new website is helping the Mahoning Valley’s largest youth soccer organization communicate more effectively with its players, coaches and parents – and at substantially lower cost.
The Youngstown Area Youth Soccer League launched its new site recently with the help of Pecchia Communications, a Youngstown public relations firm.
Built on a WordPress platform, the site enables league volunteers to update text, add notices, upload pictures and more, all with the ease of editing a Word document. Moreover, Pecchia Comm launched the site on a server that costs the league less than $10 a month for hosting.
“This is an excellent solution for non-profits like us that are pressed on resources, yet still want to communicate effectively,” said Mike Mortimer, the league’s volunteer secretary, who served as the main contact for the site development. “It’s like day and night, compared to our old site.”
New Site Helps League Reach Goals
By enabling coaches to report game results through digital online forms, YAYSL volunteers save a lot of time and sharply reduce opportunities for errors.
Still located at www.yaysl.org, the new site offers far more advantages than its predecessor, Mortimer points out. Those include the following:
- Easy editing. The old site was primarily a landing page with links to PDF documents. Whenever the league wanted to add new information, it had to create a new PDF and then email it to a local website company so that one of its programmers could upload the document to the site. Now, league volunteers just log in to an administrative area and add content to the site, or edit it, just like they’d edit a document in Word or PowerPoint, or save a new document in a desktop folder.
- Speed. Instead of having to create a PDF with new information, and then wait for a website company programmer to upload it, league volunteers can make edits on their own timetable. No PDFs or emails.
- Pricing. Previously, the league paid for the time the programmer spent uploading new PDFs. Now, volunteers update the site on their own, without any programming fees.
- Style. The new site simply looks nicer and loads easier. Whereas the old site required users to open PDFs to read most of the information, today users navigate seamlessly among fast-loading web pages – as most web users expect to do while online.
Emerging Tools Break Down Barriers
Editing content on the YAYSL site is as easy as editing text in Word.
Dan Pecchia, president of Pecchia Communications, said the emergence of WordPress, other easy-to-use platforms and low-cost hosting solutions are good news for non-profits like YAYSL and other cost-conscious organizations.
“These new tools have sharply reduced the cost to develop new and updated sites,” Pecchia said. “More importantly, they’ve removed the need for skilled programmers to manage content once it’s launched.
“In the past, concern about the cost to maintain sites day to day put a chill on new sites and major updates, even when the needs were obvious.
“Today, though, we can build low-cost sites with content-management systems that a client’s clerical professionals can navigate about as easily as they navigate Windows.”
Individuals interested in more information about cost-effective interactive solutions can fill out a contact form here.
