Lausanne Hockey Club website redesign

In recent years, the LHC has undergone a profound transformation: sporting results that have placed it among Switzerland's leading clubs, growing popularity and fast-expanding commercial activity. Deeply rooted in Lausanne and the canton of Vaud, the club brings together a large community and a diverse audience. The brief was therefore not to modernise an existing website, but to evolve the club's entire digital experience to match this new sporting, popular and economic dimension.

The redesign had to turn the site into the central entry point for the LHC's digital universe. Working through this with the club allowed us to rethink an ecosystem made up of numerous content types, services and platforms, in order to better organise them around the needs of its different audiences.

But structuring this ecosystem wasn't enough. The site also had to convey what makes the sport what it is: the intensity of a game, the emotion of the images, the attachment to the players and the rhythm of a season. We wanted to create a digital experience capable of informing, but also of extending the club's experience beyond the rink.

The LHC speaks to a wide range of audiences: long-time supporters, new audiences, families, partners and companies, as well as media — but also the Lions, the Lionnes and the young Lionceaux through the Academy. The LHC needed to come across as a club and an ecosystem, not just a professional team. Their expectations differ depending on their relationship with the club and the point in the season. We worked with LHC staff to understand these different audiences, their needs and the key moments of their journey.

From pre-match build-up to following results, discovering the teams or buying a ticket, we mapped out their main journeys to understand what information should be made accessible, when and in what context. This thinking guided the site's structure and how it connects with the LHC's wider digital ecosystem, from ticketing to the shop to the Foundation.

A challenge quickly emerged: how do we give every LHC team its rightful place while keeping a simple, legible experience?

Each team has its own roster, schedule, results and statistics. We designed a shared structure and navigation that makes it easy to move from one team to another while keeping the same landmarks. Each team thus finds its place on the site, while preserving an experience common to the whole LHC.

Hockey is all about atmosphere and emotion: the sound of skates on the ice, the supporters, the players, the lights… and all the intensity that comes with every game! Our main challenge was therefore to recapture that electric energy within the LHC's digital experience.

To create a link between the experience at the Vaudoise aréna and the one on the site, we drew inspiration from an iconic feature of the rink: the jumbotron. Its visual universe and codes notably inspired the way matches and scores are presented on the site. Supporters thus rediscover on their screens a familiar element of the experience they live in the Lausanne stands.

And since the heart of the LHC is its games, the homepage also evolves on match days. Match preview, access to the arena, jersey auctions and the match programme: everything is designed so that the experience aligns with supporters' needs, right when that content becomes relevant. The homepage thus lives to the rhythm of the games and extends the match experience onto their screens.

Beyond the supporter experience, the site is also a business lever for the club. Content, ticketing, merchandising, hospitality, partners and corporate services: digital needed to better connect these different worlds, turning the site into a commercial asset in its own right for the LHC — not just a showcase.

Self-promotion banners allow the LHC to showcase these offerings and support ticket sales throughout the season. Partner visibility was also considered at several levels: official partners in the pre-footer change depending on the team being viewed, while sponsored spaces make it possible to associate a brand with specific content or placements, such as the jumbotron or a news item.

The site thus becomes an additional space to showcase the club's offerings and those of its partners, while integrating them directly into the supporters' experience.

Supporters need to be able to follow the club wherever they are. So we built a Progressive Web App (PWA), combining the accessibility of the web with certain mobile-app-like behaviours. The site can be used directly from a browser, but can also be installed on the home screen for users who want to keep the LHC within easy reach.

This approach makes it possible to offer a single experience, available to everyone without a download, yet close to a native app for the most engaged supporters. Notifications also let the club extend its relationship with its community and share match information or news throughout the season.

Schedules, standings, statistics, line-ups and live scores: a large part of the site evolves in step with the sports data supplied by the SIHF, the Swiss Ice Hockey Federation.

To integrate this data and put it to use across the site, we built our own SDK. It centralises the various feeds and makes them easy for the platform's different features to use.

The site can thus evolve along with the rhythm of the season and its games, letting supporters find their teams' information before, during and after each match.

To follow a game live, the site needs to react almost instantly. So we designed an event-driven architecture: when a match event is sent by the SIHF (kick-off, a goal, a penalty or the end of the game), the relevant content is automatically updated and, when needed, a notification is sent to supporters. The site thus evolves in real time, at the rhythm of what's happening on the ice.

To make sure the site stays fast during periods of high traffic, we ran load tests reproducing the real conditions of a match night, up to 6,000 sessions per hour.

Even during traffic peaks and live updates, the cache hit rate stays above 95%, with a p95 server response time under 20 ms and no failed requests.