Azure and Sunderland University have teamed up to create the the brand new Sunderland City Predators website. Launched at the end of February 2013, in time for the first Urban Athletes Road Show in Sunderland’s Bridges shopping centre.
Sunderland City Predators are a community-focused sports club established in 2012 by the University of Sunderland. Aimed at providing sporting opportunities for the Sunderland community as a whole – both students and residents, the club has teams, programmes, and opportunities in Volleyball, Netball, and Women’s Basketball for anyone aged 7 years and up, and will further grow this offer in 2013 with the introduction of Men’s Basketball and Futsal.
The new website promotes the activities of each of the clubs as well as the superb sporting facilities the University boasts and provides up-to-date results of the Urban Athletes programme, through which Sunderland City Predators are taking to the streets of the city in an attempt to find who has the fastest reaction, the highest jump, the fastest sprint, and the best balance and agility.
Azure Studio Manager, Vince Moran, said: “as a company, Azure have been active participants in Wearside’s local sporting scene, particularly through our 5-a-side team which plays in Crowtree’s Wednesday Evening league.
“Being from Manchester, the lads in the Azure office seem to think I know nothing about football. I am, though aware of how terrible they are at it and also how important it is for all of us to meet up regularly away from the office and play. We spend many hours every day sat at our desks pushing pixels round a screen, so it’s vital we have outlets such as the Southwick Carpets League to blow off a bit of steam and keep fit.
“When Matt from the University of Sunderland first approached Azure to explain what Sunderland City Predators were trying to do, we jumped at the chance to collaborate with them on the project. The student community is a vibrant part of life in Sunderland these days and anything we can do to help integrate them with the daily lives of the locals has to be a good thing. And when it comes to integration, few things unite people like sport.
“This was a great project for us, the guys from Sunderland City Predators were a pleasure to work with and we’re really proud of the result, which we’re sure will work well for them.”
Important Information for Azure Clients Using Twitter
In August of last year Twitter announced changes to their API (Application Programming Interface – the system that allows people like us to talk to Twitter and pull out your latest tweets, mentions etc. and display them on your website).
The gist of the announcement is that Twitter are making changes to the way we are allowed to interact with them and that those changes will result in a number of plug-ins and scripts that display tweets on websites ceasing to work.
These changes are now all but complete and last week we saw the first trials of the API switchover, which resulted in temporary downtime for some of our clients’ website twitter feeds. These will become more regular over the course of the next few weeks before ceasing to work entirely some time towards the end of March.
The Azure team are looking at ways of minimising the impact of the Twitter changes by updating all affected clients together. If your website displays information from your Twitter account please get in touch as soon as possible to talk about what we can do to minimise disruption in advance of the changeover.