NSC Minnesota Stars Soccer Launch New Team Website

The National Sports Center’s new Minnesota Stars soccer team website.

The NSC Stars went live with their new website on Tuesday morning.

IMS spent some time exploring the site and found it to be not only attractive and clean, but intuitive, organized and filled with features that will allow content to be added in the future. The site already has fan links as well as a “Fanzone” category. They also have a soccer “Headlines” section on the front page much like the Vancouver Whitecaps site.

Scott Clasen of the National Sports Center is responsible for the site. Clasen is often seen as the on-air host of NSC TV, but his actual title is Business Tech Project Manager. Clasen seems to wear many hats with the NSC. The former school teacher has built and maintains both the NSC and USA CUP websites. He also oversees various tech projects including a “massive project” Clasen says that the NSC has entered into with HangAStar Inc. which will totally revamp the tournament scheduling process they currently use. He also works closely with the accounting department in utilizing their software as effectively as possible.

IMS talked with Clasen about building the new soccer team’s website.

IMS: Can you tell me how big of a role you played in designing this website?

Clasen: I did the whole thing from start to finish! I found the partner organization (Demosphere), designed all the graphics, navigation elements, pages and copy. Basically, this was my baby since the team was announced.

IMS: How do you start a project like that from scratch?

Clasen: I was excited to start the project and after having designed the NSC and USA CUP websites felt up to the challenge. Designing is the fun part of my job!

Like both of those sites, I started by looking at other sites that were similar. I viewed every MLS team site, a large number of USL team sites as well as other minor league team sites to get ideas. I also took the feedback from some core supporters about what team sites they liked and disliked.

The wrinkle with this site was knowing that we needed to partner with a company that could offer a robust content management system. Both the NSC and USA CUP sites are maintained in Dreamweaver and I make all the edits and additions. That has worked fine for the last 4 years because the number of updates each day is not overwhelming. We knew with the Stars site we’d be generating much more content and updates would be happening frequently so we needed a system that would allow people beyond me to make updates, which is where a CMS comes in. I didn’t want to be the one posting a press release or game notes or video at 11:30 pm after a game!

IMS: It sounds like a daunting task?

Clasen: It was daunting in the sense that I was already working full-time with other tech projects and maintaining the current sites under my responsibility. I also really felt the time crunch to get a site up and running very quickly.

IMS: What were your influences?

Clasen: The number one site I used as an influence was the Seattle Sounders website. It’s far and away the best MLS team site. They have so much robust power on that site with their social networking/blogging platform that I knew we couldn’t replicate because of costs, but I love every single thing about their design elements. To me, too many team sites, in soccer and other sports, have homepages that are too busy. Everyone wants a piece of real estate on the homepage and as a result, they end up cluttered and your eye struggles to find something to grab onto to. I wanted to avoid that with the Stars homepage.

IMS congratulates Clasen and the NSC team for creating an outstanding looking site and is looks forward to the future content that will fill it.