SF Unicorns
The San Francisco Unicorns play professional T20 cricket in Major League Cricket, but their website was a Google Site. We designed and built a WordPress platform for squad, matches and news in three weeks, then added live scores for the 2026 season.
The SF Unicorns now run squad, fixtures, news, partners and their foundation from one WordPress site their own staff update, with the 2026 refresh and live scoring built on the same base.
What we were solving
The San Francisco Unicorns are the Bay Area's professional T20 cricket team, a founding franchise of Major League Cricket. In April 2024 their website was a Google Site holding news posts and little else. Fans couldn't find fixtures, the squad or ticketing without leaving the site, and it didn't look like a professional sports brand.
The 2024 season was weeks away. The club had a brand guideline, a sponsor roster, a growing squad and a news archive to bring across. It had no content team with time to learn a developer's tool.
The project came through Visual Traffic, a Melbourne agency handling the club's creative. They owned the relationship and the brand. We owned the website. That meant a three-way loop across Melbourne, Singapore and California, a few hours of overlap a day, and a launch date that wouldn't move.
How we tackled it
Homepage first, then the whole site in a day
We wireframed the site, then put the homepage visual design in front of Visual Traffic on 23 April 2024. The angled cut on image blocks and buttons became the site's signature, trimmed back after round one so the two didn't fight. The rest of the pages followed the next day. Two rounds of changes, a day or two each, and sign-off within the week.
Built for the people who update it on match day
Development started on 29 April, in WordPress on Beaver Builder so club staff could edit pages without a developer. Squad, matches, news, partners and events each got a template and a post type. Players reorder by drag and drop. Sponsors sit in one global area so a logo change happens once. News posts came across from the Google Site. The site went live on 14 May 2024, three weeks after the first design.
A second season on the same foundation
In late 2025 the club wanted the site closer to the Australian Big Bash franchises it admired. We audited six pages against four competitor sites and planned component upgrades, not a rebuild. A new homepage hero, next-match widget, stats section, player cards and match cards shipped in two phases in early 2026. The Unicorns Sport Foundation got its own page, cloned from an existing template with a contact form, so the charity launched without a second site.
Live scores in time for the first ball
In June 2026 the club asked for live scores on the site, fed from a Cricket21 API arranged by its partner Persistent. The documentation reached us on 16 June. We built a WordPress plugin: a PHP layer that holds the credentials and proxies the feed, fixture cards, a scoreboard that polls every 15 seconds, and full batting and bowling scorecards. It went live on 19 June, hours before the Unicorns' opening match, with the 2025 season as an archive.
What we delivered
The SF Unicorns now have a site that carries a full Major League Cricket season: live scores, fixtures and results, a squad with player numbers and flags, partner logos, a merchandise link and news the club publishes itself. The Unicorns Sport Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity, has its own page and programme pillars under Community. The site runs on our Website Care plan, so we handle security monitoring and updates. Two seasons on, club staff still run the platform we built, and the 2026 refresh reused every post type from 2024.
What we learned
Three time zones and a fixed launch date only work with a short review loop. Putting the homepage up first, before the other designs existed, got the direction agreed in two days instead of two weeks. The second lesson came in 2026. Because every piece of club content was already a post type, the refresh was a component job and the live scores a plugin. Nothing had to be migrated, and the club kept publishing throughout.
Impact & outcomes
from first visual design to launch
component upgrades in the 2026 refresh
from API documentation to live scores on the site
