Case Study: Markham Pan Am Centre

A website that helped fill the rental calendar at a 2015 Pan Am Games facility

In Partnership With

Marketing & Events

Client Background

About the client

The Markham Pan Am Centre is a legacy building from the 2015 Toronto Pan Am Games, hosting the Badminton, Table Tennis, and Water Polo competitions. The world-class sporting facility is now utilized for a variety of sporting clubs, organizations, and associations that are in search of practice space, competitions, and event hosting.

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Commissioned for the 2015 Pan Am Games
147,000 sqft sports facility
Fully accessible LEED award winning building
2 million+ visitors over 600 sporting events
Olympic-sized (50 metre) 10-lane swimming pool

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We thoroughly enjoyed working directly with Leaf design as we developed our Markham Pan Am Centre website. Our result was more than what we expected!

Janis Cookson

(Former) Manager, Sport Development at City of Markham

Where We Started

The challenge

At the project’s inception, the only web presence that the venue had was a single, text-heavy page buried deep within the City of Markham website. It was a point of presence, but hardly a “sales tool” for attracting top sporting organizations from around the world.

As such, the Markham Pan Am Centre had no ability to market the benefits of their world-class facility. And without the ability to market the venue, it made it difficult to book events to ultimately generate revenue for the facility.

Inability to market the benefits of the facility to sporting organizations
Unable to grow revenue by increasing their venue bookings
Could not inform the community about upcoming sporting events
Unable to add any new content about the venue

How We Collaborated

Design process

The design process for this project was a little different than with most clients. The main issue was that the Markham Pan Am Centre had no corporate logo or branding guidelines developed when we started the project.

The original thought going into the project was to simply not use a logo at all, and use a blue colour scheme (derived from some existing marketing material).

However, upon visiting the building for a meeting with the client, we found some inspiration in the “fins” that the iconic building was constructed with. This provided us with a colour palette and was the driving force behind the creation of a new logo for the facility.

In fact, the border at the top and bottom of the page designs is an exact match of the top row of fins on the building.

1. Design brief

The initial design brief for this project was developed with a few gaps, as the client’s branding was a work in progress.

2. Wireframe

The wireframe was developed to ensure that the key information about the venue was displayed on the home page.

3. Initial concept

While it followed the wireframe we had planned out, to be completely honest, our initial concept was not very inspiring.

4. Final design

Pretty much every element of the design was revisited with a fresh approach to create a concept loved by all stakeholders.

The Results

Our solution

Branding

Copywriting

Responsive Web Development

UI/UX Design

WordPress Integration

The new website for the Markham Pan Am Centre provided the client with a website that not only markets their offerings to sports organizations from around the world, but also speaks directly to the residents of the City of Markham about sports and physical literacy.

Upcoming events schedule

A key component of the website was an event calendar that allowed visitors to quickly see what is going on at the venue in the near future. Rather than using a traditional calendar layout, we designed a chronological month-based list that is easier to read.

The list always begins with the very next event, and automatically hides past events from view. Each entry contains facility and event details, with linked to additional information offsite. This makes management of the content simple and efficient for the marketing team.