Sportwerk Düsseldorf website

Sportwerk has grown from a small taekwondo club into a recognised performance centre — honoured by the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the German Olympic Sports Confederation, the state sports association and the national taekwondo federation. The Unterbilk site is a state performance centre and a national training base for taekwondo. More than 900 members train across several locations, from grassroots sport to the national squad. On top of that, a boutique fitness concept and an affiliated physiotherapy practice.

The original design is not mine: there was a very precise design template, and I built it. The entire implementation is my work, and everything added since then I designed as well — the championship section, for example, in full.

That is exactly where the real difficulty lies: a site that grows in stages over years normally frays. Every new section brings its own handwriting, until nothing fits together any more. My job was to build new parts so that they fit the existing ones without perpetuating their weaknesses.

The recurring element is the Champions Camps. Every year again: update the page, set up the registration form, manage the registrations. Over time, training plans embedded as PDFs, forms built with a lot of fields, the gallery reworked, a Facebook connection set up, server configuration adjusted, newsletters sent. Membership and trial sessions run through the site.

Sportwerk is one of my oldest clients and one of the most valuable. Over time the collaboration has become something close to family. It is the kind of project that never looks spectacular in a portfolio, because the big relaunch moment is missing — but it is the kind of collaboration that says the most about the work: someone calls, something has to work, and it works.