“We Are Ayala 2.0”

The ultimate goal is to take the existing brand of Ayala BAC, and push it forward to the next level by being more visible and heard by the community.

Create a new Ayala BAC website that is easy to find on Google, easy to navigate, and can be a new location for important information and media for our boosters, students, staff, and fans.

Make it easier for future boosters to learn and use so that future generations can run it just as successfully.

Students, parents, staff members, fans of Ayala BAC, and members of the marching band community. The program is always for the students, and is ran by the Parents and Staff members. So naturally the website is just another tool for them to use to better inform themselves on the past, present, and future events of the Ayala BAC. Also, we wanted to make it easier for other members of the community to find and contact us, as it was very difficult in the past.

Once I took over as Communications Director in March, the new board members made it a goal to have the new website by the time we had our first band camp on May 30th. That is when we have a large influx of new freshmen and parents, so we wanted to be able to fully launch by then. Our order of operations was to:

#1 Initiate a domain transfer from the old booster who created our original website over 10 years ago

#2 Download all the old content from the new website

#3 Create a Squarespace site and begin designing it with some of the old content in mind, while incorporating new content

#4 Show the website to the staff and board members for approval and changes

#5 Launch the site during the kickoff parent meeting on May 24, 2023

The Communications Director (myself), the Booster President, and Booster Treasurer were involved in figuring out what features we wanted the new website to have. As a group we dedicated about 2 weeks of brainstorming, while I worked on implementation for about 2 months.

Squarespace was the main site builder, but for some graphics I used Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom to edit photos from the past seasons. I did research on Youtube on how to do certain things on Squarespace, as well as how to make the website show up correctly on Google searches.

The only strategy we had was to attempt to continue to make changes and make content, whether it be through our social media accounts, our Band App, or the website. In this time, constant movement is important in being able to stay fresh and current. Also, in creating the website keep in mind that other boosters in the future will follow and will need to be able to understand and learn how to make changes.

Just the monthly cost of the Squarespace website, which is $23 per month. We will have to pay for the domain at the end of the year, which will be $14 per year.

The main challenges were trying to learn how to do everything on your own. Through the use of research and Youtube, I was able to learn everything on my own. I am also trying to learn how to shoot video to be able to create better content for all our platforms.

Our website can now be found easily by searching for “Ayala BAC” or “Ayala Band” in google. It is currently the #1 search result. Before this, it was somewhere on the 2nd or 3rd page of the results. Also, we have full access to the website now and it is easy to manage and add content. So we have been able to use it as a hosting platform for images and email blasts.

Because of our greater visibility from our new website and new social media content, we are getting more engagement with our parents and students. This will hopefully translate to more parents being involved with the program. The season is still early, so we will see once competition season starts.