Charlotte Ironclad FC: a broadcast-inspired sports marketing site

Brief

I set this brief for myself deliberately: design a real-world marketing layout, not an isolated component demo. That meant a hero, roster, schedule, news cards, ticket CTA, and sponsor placements all working together as one identity.

Who it's for

A club site serves people at different points in the same funnel, from awareness to a ticket in hand.

• Curious locals (primary): people who've heard of the club but never been to a match. The hero and ticker have a few seconds to make it feel like an event worth going to.
• Existing fans: they come back for the schedule, roster and news, so those need to be quick to scan and always one tap from tickets.
• Sponsors: they pay for visibility, so their placements have to be seen without competing with the ticket button.

Process

I built the identity around live sports broadcasts rather than generic sports-brand cliché: charcoal, steel blue, amber, and teal, paired with a condensed display face that reads the way a scoreboard reads.

Signature element

An auto-scrolling, skewed ticker strip styled after a broadcast lower-third. It's the one element I let carry all the personality, everything else on the page stays quiet so the ticker keeps its edge.

Craft details

• Built the visual system in Sass (variables, nesting, mixins) so the palette and spacing scale stay consistent across every section.
• Respected prefers-reduced-motion on the ticker animation rather than treating accessibility as an afterthought.
• Fully responsive down to mobile, tested against the same grid Bootstrap 5 provides as scaffolding.

Scope

Every section had to move someone one step closer to buying a ticket, or pay for the club. The roster and news build attachment, the schedule turns interest into a date, and the ticket button closes.

• Out of the first version: a merch shop and live scores. Both are real wants, but a shop competes with tickets for the same click, and live scores need a paid data feed before they're worth showing.

Measuring success

Ironclad is a concept, so these are the measures I'd set for a real club, using the funnel the page is built around.

• Primary: the share of homepage visits that click through to buy tickets, split by first-time and returning visitors.
• Secondary: schedule views that lead to a ticket click, which shows whether the page turns interest into a specific match, and sponsor placement views and clicks for the club's sponsor reports.
• Guardrail: mobile load time on match days, when many fans check the site from their phones. The ticker can't be the reason someone gives up before reaching tickets.