Redesigning the Windsor Soccer League Website: A Custom SportsPress Pro Theme

We’ve sponsored the Windsor Soccer League for about a year, so when Shane and his team asked us to rework the league’s website, we were excited to take it on. The old site held a huge amount of information: years of standings, stats and results, all running on WordPress and plugins like SportsPress Pro. The job was to make all of that easier to use without losing any of it. (For the short version, see the Windsor Soccer League case study.)

We set three goals:

1. Make the site better for players. This mattered most.
2. Keep and protect the legacy stats and content.
3. Raise the design to match the league Shane and his team have built in Windsor.

Goal 1: Design around why players visit

Start with the audience

We estimated that about 90% of the site’s visitors are players: people already on a team, and people thinking about joining one. So we asked Shane and a group of players why they open the site. Two answers came up again and again: checking scores and checking the schedule.

That settled the homepage. Scores and schedules had to be in the hero section, not buried a few clicks down.

Our first draft had a more generic, SEO-focused hero section. We dropped it for an informational one, because a returning player wants tonight’s kickoff time, not a sales pitch. For a site where most visitors already know the brand, getting them to the right page quickly does more than a keyword-heavy headline would.

Learn from the big leagues

Next we looked at how the biggest sports sites handle the same problem, including the NHL and Spain’s LaLiga, to see what the major leagues put first.

That pushed us toward a proper news section. We chose a two-column hero:

• Left: a news slider for league announcements, registration deadlines and season launches.
• Right: the current league leaderboard, with arrows to cycle through each league and stat (top goal scorers, for example).

On mobile the columns stack and the leaderboard sits right under the ticker.

An upcoming match ticker under the header

Just below the header, a scrolling match ticker shows the next fixtures and kickoff times. It appears on every page, so players and fans can check who’s playing tonight from wherever they are on the site.

Season info for people thinking about joining

Below the fold, the homepage is for people who haven’t signed up yet. It covers each league’s format, divisions, match days, season dates and whether registration is open, with a Find Your Club search above it for returning players.

72 teams, shown as a moving logo wall

The old site opened with a large block of team logos, and the league has kept growing since: about 60 teams last season, 72 at the time of writing. A static grid of 72 logos is a lot to take in, so we built two rows that scroll automatically in opposite directions. The whole league still gets shown, and the section feels alive instead of crowded.

Under it, a League Champions carousel shows past title winners by season and division, so players can look back at what their team has won.

Team pages players care about

In one of our meetings with the league, we kept coming back to the same point: rec soccer matters because players feel ownership of their teams and have goals for them, season after season.

So we expanded the team and player pages. Every team page now shows:

• seasons played
• championships won
• founding date
• the team’s manager
• the leagues they play in
• current standing and record

A page like that is something a team can point to. It gives players another reason to share the site and come back to it.

Goals 2 and 3: A new theme on existing data, launched mid-season

The hardest part of this project wasn’t the design. It was launching without breaking anything.

The league was partway through a season, so we had to:

• keep every existing stat, result, team and player record
• leave the admin workflow alone, since league staff were entering scores every week
• go live without a data migration

Instead of rebuilding the site on a new platform, we wrote a custom WordPress theme from scratch. It reads the existing SportsPress Pro data and displays it differently. Custom theme options handle everything SportsPress doesn’t do on its own, like the ticker, the homepage sections and the extra team details. The league’s data and its admin screens stayed exactly as they were.

That made launch day simple: we uploaded and activated the new theme. Nothing was migrated, nothing was re-entered, and the staff kept entering scores the same way they always had. If you’re planning a website redesign, it’s worth asking whether you need a new platform at all, or just a new way of presenting the data you already have. Our website redesign checklist covers the same idea from the SEO side.

The response

Players and fans have responded well to the new site, and we’re glad to keep supporting local Windsor sports. Congratulations to the Windsor Soccer League on the new season, and a shout-out to the team we sponsor, Wizz FC.

Need a website like this?

If you want a fast, SEO-friendly, animated website that’s built around how your visitors actually use it, we’re booking projects for the rest of 2026 and into 2027. Our websites range from $2,000 to $5,000, and hosting is optional. Our guide to website costs in Canada explains what affects the price.

• See more of our recent projects
• Learn about our web design services in Windsor
• Contact us or give us a call. When we have availability, we’ll put together a free mockup of your new site.