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Brief
Manchester City Football Club (MCFC) is one of the UK’s highest profile Premiership Football clubs. In keeping with its high profile image MCFC demanded that its new website – www.mcfc.co.uk - should be nothing short of the best football club site on the web.
Furthermore, it was to be delivered within just six months. The challenges involved were many-fold. For instance, the site would have to be capable of supporting very large spikes in traffic, be always up-to-date, interactive and informative for fans and allow transactions for sales of match tickets and merchandising through an e-commerce shop. Conceived as a site for fans old and new, the site was to be social and media rich with a great deal of high resolution photography and video content. To cater for the club’s growing following in the Middle East the site also had to be available in multiple languages including Arabic which requires text and other content to read from right to left.
Strategy
The underlying principle that this was to be, above all, a site for the fans lay at the heart of the strategy. To achieve this Aqueduct, a Sitecore Solution Partner, worked with creative agency Poke to deliver a site with a rich seam of content. The site’s main function is to provide fans with uniquely sourced content from within the club (for example news and videos featuring player and staff interviews). At the same time there are links to the dozens of unofficial football forums, blogs and message boards where fans regularly take part in highly opinionated discussions. The aim is for the club site to coexist with these forums helping to drive traffic to them and forging strong links with discussion board moderators in the process.
To make sure the site was accessible and easy for everyone to navigate focus groups were set up to test the web journeys of three different categories of fan – the local season-ticket holder who visits the site every day for club news, the London-based fan who goes to the occasional game when he can and the new fan from overseas whose interest in MCFC was triggered by some of the recent marquee player signings and whose only access to MCFC is via television and the internet.
A third aspect of the strategy was to ensure the information architecture was robust enough to handle the complex processes involved in the ticketing and retail sections of the website. The website infrastructure had to be familiar with the many rules associated with ticket purchase and the different discounts available from the shop based on a customer’s membership package.
Execution
At the heart of the MCFC website is Sitecore’s advanced Web CMS website platform. Sitecore CMS was chosen for its ease of implementation and its ability to manage a wealth of integrated business web applications from standard tools such as Flash through to complex e-commerce systems. Sitecore’s ability to keep content separate from presentation allowed Poke to implement its many envelope-pushing designs effortlessly. Meanwhile the website can be maintained in near real-time during games and key events by MCFC’s team of content editors. Aqueduct accomplished this by building a real-time solution module that integrates into Sitecore CMS. This allows journalists and other non-technical contributors to provide real-time commentary and upload imagery to the site, which is then published, in real time, via a Flash & AJAX interface.
The club started using Twitter during the summer. Today the MCFC Twitter feed has approaching 10,000 followers despite very little promotion. To help show the benefits of Twitter (which many site visitors still don't understand) the latest tweet is automatically pulled into one of the content modules on the homepage. Another guiding principle is that the majority of content (text, images and video) should be sharable. To execute this, a sharing button was integrated into every article, enabling fans to share content with their friends or add it to their personal Facebook page/ blog page, but also allows the Club to restrict sharing of rights managed content.
Aqueduct took advantage of Sitecore’s flexibility to extend the website’s functionality still further. For instance, they added content feed modules so that live game data could be fed into the site. Elsewhere they implemented Brightcove to allow for seamless integration between MCFC’s video streaming and distribution platform and Sitecore.
To address the ticketing and e-commerce requirements Aqueduct worked with current suppliers, IRIS for the ticketing systems, Metagy for the shop management and logistics and YesPay for all transactions. LimeLight CDN was also included in order to offload the bandwidth-heavy media serving requirements for the site.
The execution phase encompassing 357 developer days, 109,227 lines of code, 18 weekly scrum cycles and continuous rigorous testing - at its peak, a whole month of testing was crammed into a 36 hour period – was completed within the six months’ deadline. This is an impressive achievement given the number of third parties that had to be relied upon for integration.
The site has since launched in Arabic, and there are plans to add another 2-3 languages in the near future with at least one more Unicode language set to be included.
Results
The new site was launched on July 1st 2009. Manchester City FC and their fans are very pleased with the look and feel of the site which makes extensive use of a number of disparate content technologies that are integrated through Sitecore CMS.
All of the user interactions of the site are carefully monitored using Google and Brightcove analytics. Manchester City is interested to measure the total number of users, where they come from, the number of pages that they visit and the length of time they spend on the site.
On launch day Manchester City reported 90,000 unique visits including more than 1,000 orders on the shop in 24 hours – equivalent to more than £50,000. Since then the numbers have continued to grow. In the first two weeks of going live there were more than 1.4 million unique visits and 9 million page views. After 100 days the number of unique visitors had risen to 3 million and included 45 million page views at an average of 5 pages per visit and 4 minutes’ browsing time on site.
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