The Auckland Rugby Referees Association is an independently run body that provides rugby union officials to over 200 games each week within the provincial Auckland Rugby Union and further afield both nationally and internationally as part of the World Rugby representative system.

Prior to a website overall which began in June 2014, the site had been created using HTML table frames and could only be updated by an individual editing the HTML code directly. It did not contain any means for the average user to make changes.

The new site was been built using WordPress as the CMS allowing multiple users to add and update content from an online log-in. It has also been designed with a mobile first strategy that interacts with social media portals and responds to the screen resolution of the visitor.

The initial design was adapted in late 2014 following the announcement of two new sponsors which necessitated design alterations.

Additional features include custom coding for:

• Online forms for referee reporting to Auckland Rugby Union and online backup
• Referee Profiles with Custom Fields
• Integration with Google Calendar to allow management to add events from their desktop
• Display of RSS from external sources
• Display of Referee Appointments from external site “Who’s the Ref”
• Automatic dissemination of information to social networks including FaceBook, Google+ and Twitter
• Integration of Open Graph and custom SEO code
• User interaction for social networks, allowing visitors to share links to social networks

Since this work was completed, Auckland Rugby moved all of its sites to the sporty.co.nz framework and not all of the above functionality existed within the ‘sportsground’ system so was not migrated.

Current Website: https://www.arra.org.nz/