Case study
Area Courts
A basketball league's website, rebuilt to be managed without a developer
Area Courts has been running recreational basketball in downtown Montreal since 2018, up to five runs a week. A real community, photos full of people, a club that lives. Its founder is a friend. Its website, though, worked against him.
Visit areacourts.com ↗The starting point
WordPress, on paper. In practice, a hacked together back office with no visual editing, where nothing had the right name and changing a schedule felt like archaeology. It took me a while to figure out how to manage it, and this is my job. A novice stood no chance. The design did not help: inconsistent on desktop, painful on mobile. It was not a working tool.
The brief
A site the club feeds on its own, with no training and no developer: schedules, locations, events, pricing. Two native languages for a Montreal audience. And clean, measurable foundations for both performance and search.
Before, after
The two versions, side by side.
What was delivered
A back office that makes sense
Every section of the site maps to clearly named fields. The club changes a schedule, a price or a photo without touching code, and without breaking anything.
Custom WordPress theme
Built from scratch, no sluggish page builder: light templates, a modern build, a site that stays fast and easy to maintain.
Native bilingualism
French and English served as equals: clean URLs, hreflang, content managed in both languages from the same back office.
Basketball design, mobile first
A bold orange and black identity, full width community photos, and navigation built for the phone, where the players live.
Measured performance
Optimized images, trimmed scripts, controlled loading: 90 mobile performance, measured in production, on WordPress.
Structural SEO
Clean tags, hreflang, local Montreal data: when someone searches for pickup basketball in town, the club shows up.
The method
The rebuild ran locally on a full copy, validated page by page with the club, then switched onto the domain once ready. The old site stayed up until the last day, nobody ever saw a construction site.
The numbers
PageSpeed Insights scores measured on areacourts.com in production, on mobile.