In 2018, Dixon Schwabl’s social media and PR team was on fire. Their help promoting the RBC Heritage event earned us the opportunity to redesign the event website.
The website had two main phases throughout the year. First, there was the pre-event stage where selling tickets was the primary goal. Then, during the event the site got transitioned over to help attendees out with basic information (like where to park and where to stay), and to celebrate the winner and share social media images uploaded by fans.
Because of this hard line, we set the Craft CMS back-end up with a single switch that flip between both phases of the site. While there were some design changes, flipping this switch on enabled a countdown and several pages that were set up with information on buying tickets and volunteering signup forms.
The look and feel of the site was meant to invoke the landmarks of the golf course in Hilton Head where the event was played. From the iconic lighthouse to the event’s tartan plaid texture, we combined event specific imagery around a brand that fit the RBC sponsor.
One solution I helped with was in regards to how we handled social media posts on the homepage of the site. While there were plugins and ways to pull in social media feeds from Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, we wanted to take a more curated approach to which social media posts made it onto the site. I created a process in the CMS to make it easy for our social media and other content authors to quickly upload photos, crop them, and share links back to the originating social media post.
The posts would appear in a grid and the social media team had the ability to pin certain posts in place to keep them around a little longer as new posts made their way onto the site.
I developed this site and worked closely with the client and with our social media team to make sure that when people are running around during the event they had the ability to get what they needed done without any friction. During the pre-event phase we made sure to include analytics to help spot content that was helping or hurting ticket sales.
2021 Redesign
While I got to create the site for the 2019 event, I also got a chance to redesign the site for the 2022 event.
The redesigned site was mostly a facelift on top of the existing site. It was updated to reflect some of the changes that Dixon Schwabl made to evolve the brand.
Fin
It was really cool to have a part in working on a PGA event. I like to think that getting this project was 90% because of our amazing PR team, but a part of winning the pitch for it was due to some of the other amazing web development work the team had done up until this point.
Around this time, I started fully managing the team of web developers who were working on sites like the New York State Fair website and multiple websites promoting the event spaces and businesses on the waterfront in Buffalo, NY.