Started in 2001, Team LUNA Chix has grown into a national organization committed to encouraging all women to get involved, stay active and be healthy. From the original sponsorship of a Pro Mountain Bike Team the program has grown to sponsor 26 local running, biking, and triathlon teams across the county.
With that growth came the challenge of creating a cohesive digital home for all the teams. We created a publishing platform allowing each team to publish its own content while still existing under the umbrella of one site - teamlunachix.com.
To get it right we started by listening. We interviewed Local Team Leaders, LUNA Pro Team members & LUNA employees. Our research revealed that while all the members wanted to participate in creating digital content not everyone had the time or know-how to do so. We focused on creating a site with simple tools, making it easy for everyone to participate. We also knew that the site was going to be the public face of the LUNA Chix progam and had to look great.
Armed with our research we set out to create a publishing platform that supported community features like calendars, forums, file sharing and reporting tools. We also integrated Flikr photo and video feeds to keep the content on the site fresh.
We embraced the use of a variety of existing tools to put together the site. We used Expression Engine as the backbone of the site, which provided a built-in content management system for team members to use. Using Flickr was an efficient way to add photo and video sharing as users are already familiar with the tools and the cost for development is significantly reduced. The result is an easy to use platform that’s helping build the LUNA Chix community.
