Frequently Asked Questions

How can we help you?

Our top Frequently Asked Questions. Any time we have a question posed to us, and we feel that the answer may help to answer someone from our community, we'll post it here. If you have a general question, please email us, or use our contact form to submit your question.

  • Do you build custom websites for other sports, such as Basketball, Hockey, etc.?

    We sure do! Over the years, our agency has built sites for Basketball Clubs & Associations, as well as Hockey Associations. Be sure to check out our portfolio over at our parent company - A3CS Digital

  • Do you build custom websites or do you use templates?

    All of the websites we build are from-scratch, custom designed and developed specifically for your club or association. We can use a pre-built template if you wish, for a bit lower of a price. Please contact us if you wish to discuss a pre-built template for your next project.

  • Do you build websites for $500?

    Umm, absolutely not! For real? a $500 website? We spend a lot of time and effort to build a beautiful, custom, hand-coded responsive website which fits your club or associations needs & branding. We don't work for $1 an hour. So, please don't ask us to build a cheap website for you.

  • Do you offer other services other than web design & development?

    Yes, most definitely! Our parent company - A3 Creative Solutions are experts in Branding, Graphic Design, Digital Marketing and overall creative design services. If you need a new logo, social media assets, a brochure, club/team gear graphic application layouts, or anything else, please let us know. We have you covered on the "Creative Solutions" side of things.

  • Do your websites include a member registration system?

    We are in the process of developing a built-in, basic registration system. More to be announced mid-Q2 2021. If you would like to sign up to be a beta tester of our new registration system, please contact us.

    In the meantime, we recommend using our friends over at PowerUp Sports Management for your registration system.

  • Is my website ADA accessible and follow ADA compliance?

    Yes, for the most part, all of our websites follow the basic ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliancy (using Canadian Standards), following the WCAG 2.0 Guidelines. However, it should be noted that these standards are frequently and without notice updated regularly, in which case if further updates are required these will need to be at the expense of the client. During the development phase of your project we will review all necessary components of your website, audit accessibility and update as required.

  • What’s included (and not included) in the price?

    What is included in the project price?

    • Initial Project Discovery.
    • Design of a few pages of your new website.
    • Development of your website.
    • Training.
    • Basic SEO set up.
    • Go Live of your website.
    • Plus any other items listed in your package price or agreed upon proposal scope of work.
    • Basic security monitoring of your website, and general after hours support.

    What is not include in your project price?

    • Content writing.
    • Video creation or editing.
    • Stock Images (unless agreed to in your signed scope of work).
    • Any consultation that exceeds 1 hour prior to signing agreement or more than 3 hours after signing agreement.
    • Extended timelines of project development (our websites are built based on a set schedule).
    • Free updates for life. Your website project will typically come with a set amount of time 'post go-live' of your website. Any updates required after the agreed upon 'post go-live' updates will be billable at our non-profit rate.
  • What sort of training/support do you offer after the website is launched?

    All of our website projects offer training and support, both during the development and for a set time period after your website is live. This is typically included in your project proposal price and scope of work. If you wish to retain our services after your training and support options are completed, we do offer Monthly Creative Retainer Options. Please contact us for more details.

  • What will be required from our club/association throughout the project?

    We require your time and effort during the project. This means that you will form a website committee within your club or associations executive board to be available to answer questions, provide content and proof designs and development of the website. This involves a time commitment from your team. We require all questions and queries to be answered within one business day. Since our website design and development is based on a set schedule, it is important that you and your team stay committed and responsive during the term of this project.

    Typically we require questions and queries to be answered through our Project Management Tool and/or by email.

    Any delays in the project as a result of delays in responses, content provided or any other commitment by the club or association may result suspension of your project and further project costs (i.e. re-start fees).

  • Will our staff be able to make basic website updates?

    Every soccer club or association website we build is fully optimized to ensure your staff are able to make updates to the agreed upon sections of the website. We will provide a training module for your website upon site completion, which will include step-by-step video tutorials on how to update sections of your website.

    As your website is custom design and developed, some sections may not be easily update-able by your team; in this case, you may need to retain our services to provide technical update assistance.

  • Do you have a portfolio I can see?

    Yes, definitely. You can see our recent work on the portfolio page of this website, or on our parent companies website here. Please note, we do our best to update our portfolio page as often as possible, but we get busy and sometimes it can take longer than expected to post new work. If you ever want to see more than what we have on our website, please contact us by email.

  • How many rounds of design edits / revisions are included?

    For our website mock ups (designs) we typically allow up to 3 edits/revisions. The amount of edits/revisions to designs are included in your proposal scope of work. If you have any questions about this topic, please contact us.

  • Are you web designs responsive?

    Yes! All of our websites are built as one website that supports and responds to all modern view screens (responsive design). Furthermore, our designs typically follow a mobile-first approach, meaning we design from Mobile first, then Tablet then Desktop. In our experience, soccer club websites typically have a 55%+ mobile usage stat for their websites, so it makes sense to ensure that websites respond well on mobile.

    Lastly, we also ensure that your website is optimized for mobile, including (but not limited to): larger font sizes, optimized/compressed images, if required, mobile-centric content delivery, and overall speed optimization to ensure that your mobile site doesn't use up all of your members data.

  • Do you build WordPress websites?

    We no longer build websites using the WordPress platform. WordPress' code-base is old, bloated and not as flexible as more modern CMS's. Furthermore, the 'Open Source' platform is subject to security and privacy breaches. We made a decision a few years back to ensure we only use the best, most flexible, fastest websites for our clients, to be built on a CMS that we can control the code.

    When we develop a website for you, we literally know every bit of code that goes into your website. This allows us to make easy changes on the fly, fully control your SEO optimization, and much, much more.

  • Do you follow SEO best practices when building websites?

    Yes. All of our websites follow our 'Basic SEO Set Up' which includes (for all pages and modules): SEO Title & Meta Descriptions, Canonical Links, Page/Module Indexing, Open Graph & Twitter Card Set up, Schema, and a Semantic SEO page build.

    During the development of your website, we will also make specific recommendations to improve your websites search performance. As well, make specific recommendations for improve your backlink structure, social channels and more.

    Lastly, as page speed optimization is also an important factor of good SEO, we will ensure that your images, content, server side rendering are all fully optimized.

  • Do you offer hosting only?

    Unfortunately not. Our hosting is provided as a service for the websites that we build using Treepl.co as the CMS hosting provider. Our sister company, AlpineCMS is our SaaS Content Management Platform, that we use for all of our soccer club websites. We are not a hosting company. However, the sites that we host on AlpineCMS are on a secure, modern, flexible AWS server.

  • How will you handle hosting, security and maintenance?

    Our team of dedicated customer service professionals are available 5 days a week from 7:00am - 6pm (pacific standard time) to answer any issues relating to your websites hosting infrastructure. For after hours inquiries, our team is available on-call to help as required for support queries only (we do not handle website updates during after hours). If you require assistance at any time, please email us at info@a3creative-solutions and someone from our team will get back to you as soon as possible.

    AlpineCMS (by Treepl CMS) Architecture & Amazon Web Services

    Treepl CMS is fully hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and it takes advantage of a large set of its products: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for scalable computing capacity in the cloud, Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Simple Storage Service (S3) for storing and retrieving data, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Identity and Access Management (IAM), Security Groups, and others for security purposes, Simple Email Service (SES) for sending emails, CloudWatch for monitoring and others.

    In order to obtain a higher performance level, Treepl CMS customers are hosted and served from five AWS data centers: Germany (EU), Oregon (US), Sydney (AU), Canada (CA), United Kingdom (UK).

    AWS offers a reliable platform for software services used by thousands of businesses worldwide, provides services in accordance with security best practices, and undergoes regular industry‐recognized certifications and audits. More information can be found in the AWS Security White Paper.

    Operational Responsibilities of AWS and Treepl CMS

    AWS operates, manages, and controls the components from the hypervisor virtualization layer down to the physical security of the facilities in which Treepl CMS operates. In turn, Treepl CMS assumes responsibility and management of the guest operating system (including updates and security patches) and application software, as well as the configuration of the AWS‐provided security group firewall.

    AWS also operates the cloud infrastructure used by Treepl CMS to provide a variety of basic computing resources, including processing and storage. The AWS infrastructure includes facilities, network, and hardware, as well as operational software (e.g., host OS, virtualization software, etc.), which supports the provisioning and use of these resources. AWS is designed and managed according to security best practices as well as a variety of security compliance standards.

    We will maintain commercially reasonable technical and operational measures designed to protect our internal networks from malicious activity and provide for the security and integrity thereof. You acknowledge that we are not responsible for any loss or harm suffered by you resulting from a security incident. You are responsible for determining whether the Services meet applicable regulatory standards and otherwise comply with your own security requirements. You agree to configure your use of the Services in such a way as to maintain the security of the Services and our network (e.g. by only uploading software that has been demonstrated to be secure, installing patches, and not sharing passwords). More information on Treepl's security is available from our hosting provider - Treepl CMS Security Overview.

    For more information about Security, please defer to the Treepl CMS Security Overview.

  • Will our clubs website be secure?

    Most definitely! Your website is using a closed SaaS (Software as a Service) using 256-bit encryption, and monitored hourly by both AWS's security measures, and through Treepl's team of CMS experts.