Hometown Ticketing, a leader in digital ticketing solutions for schools, recognized a growing need among schools to create professional, customizable athletic websites. These websites had to serve as a hub for sports news, event ticketing, team galleries, and team roster details. To address this, Tech Holding developed a cutting-edge platform that seamlessly integrates with Hometown’s existing Box Office system while introducing a modern content management system (CMS) using Payload. The result was an intuitive, visually stunning, and highly customizable and functional website builder that empowered schools to enhance their athletic programs.

Current School clients of HomeTown struggled with outdated, difficult-to-maintain athletic websites. Common issues included:

• Lack of a unified platform to manage news, schedules, rosters, and ticket sales.
• Inconsistent branding and user experience.
• No centralized CMS, making content updates cumbersome.
• Limited ability to generate revenue through donations, merchandise sales, and live-streamed events.

With increasing expectations from students, parents, and the community, schools needed a modern, customizable platform that could handle all aspects of their athletic programs in one place.

To address these challenges, Tech Holding designed and built a powerful system that enabled schools to create and manage their own athletic websites with ease. Tech Holding solution included:

Key Features:

• News & Galleries: Schools can publish game highlights, press releases, and photo galleries to engage their communities.
• Teams & Levels: Supports multiple sports and levels (Varsity, Junior Varsity, Freshman, etc.).
• Rosters & Schedules: Easy-to-update player and coach rosters and game schedules.
• Seamless Ticket Purchase Integration: Direct integration with Hometown’s Box Office system, allowing users to purchase tickets effortlessly.
• Resources: Schools can create and manage links to various resources, providing easy access to important documents, forms, and guidelines.
• Merchandise Store: Schools can sell branded apparel and merchandise.
• Customizable UI: A modern and flexible design system that allows schools to maintain brand consistency while standing out.

Technical Implementation:

• Content Management: Tech Holding introduced PayloadCMS, an open-source headless CMS, providing schools with an intuitive backend to manage their site content with features like content drafting, versioning, and live preview capabilities.
• Seamless Integration: Leveraged Hometown’s existing Box Office system to maintain ticketing workflows.
• Multi-Tenant Design: Tech Holding implemented a smart, efficient system where a single codebase serves multiple school websites through subdomains, dramatically reducing maintenance overhead while ensuring each school's site feels unique.

Technical Details:

Tech Holding solution employs Next.js for server-side rendering, with content stored in AWS DocumentDB using a secure multi-tenant architecture. Performance is optimized through CloudFront caching and Amazon ECS with Fargate to handle traffic spikes during peak events.

The platform features TLS/SSL encryption, secure authentication, and comprehensive monitoring via CloudWatch and DataDog. Tech Holding implemented SEO-friendly URLs with unique resource identifiers and a specialized cache invalidation strategy that ensures fresh content without sacrificing performance. The CMS features seamless social media publishing capabilities, all while maintaining strict data separation between schools.