NATIONAL FOOTBALL POST

National Football Post is an online Football Magazine run by industry insiders, Michael Lombardi, Jack Betcha, Matt Bowen, and Andrew Brandt. We were brought on to develop a new identity for the company, including their logo and tagline, as well as a custom web development and web design solution for them. They already had an existing site and growing audience when they approached us, but it was our responsibility to develop a creative strategy that would enable them to compete on a larger scale with some of the national media players, such as ESPN and Fox Sports. As we developed their new site, we also were responsible for the day to day management of their existing site, which was built on a Wordpress engine. We had to make design upgrades to the existing site, integrate new tools for them to access through the back end, as well as manage their server environment….which was sweet when it got rocked due to several breaking stories all in one day, and one flimsy server to handle it.

The Game Plan

After we established the branding for the site, we then began getting into more of an in depth discovery and industry analysis process. We determined the differentiating factors that set NFP apart from the competition, which ultimately came down to their content, their access to players and personnel, and loyalty within their fan base. A fan base by the way that was much more educated and much more well spoken than many football fans out there. Being that the content, and thereby the specific people writing the content were the stars of the site, it was important to give them a prominent presence on the home page. While we certainly needed to work in a featured spot, advertising opportunities, and additional news and features, their articles were the primary reason people were coming to the site on a regular basis. We created an overall hierarchy determining the most important priorities of the site, and created a high level information architecture and wire frame from that to determine the site's overall direction.

The Wall Street Journal of Football.

We then started putting together design comps that expressed the clean, sophisticated nature of their brand. We developed a site flow that took each user's needs into consideration, depending on if they were there to browse, there to comment, there to buy NFP products or there to spend a few minutes bouncing around the site. Every forward movement on the site, and the breadcrumbs left behind, were taken into consideration for a sports fanatic that is anxious to learn as much about the sport as possible in a short period of time. Since it's a publishing site, there already is an incredible amount to take into consideration. But with this site we also had to take several interactive features into account and needed to find a way to make it easy to use for the end user, easy to update by the NFP staff, and still customized and unique to stand out in the industry and be spotlighted.

All about the Schemes. And Servers.

As one great coach once said,
“winning isn't everything, it's
the only thing.” So while NFP is
arguably the fastest growing
sports site on the Web, nearly
doubling their traffic from
month to month, the work going
on behind the scenes is arguably
the most important aspect of
keeping NFP on top . With their
rate of growth, comes a very
complex and technical server
configuration. When we inherited
the site it was on one server. As this is written, the site is now being hosted on 7 servers...and growing. From Web Servers to Database Servers to load balancers and monitoring servers, there is quite a bit going on behind the scenes, to ensure that the site is always on the screens. In addition to the consistent growth in traffic, NFP experiences unbelievable spikes in traffic. These spikes generally occur when NFP breaks a story, which they have been doing quite often. When a story breaks, there obviously is rarely enough time to be forewarned, so the site receives a tremendous amount of concurrent connections as the credit for the story is being referred by several outside sites, including some as large as Yahoo Sports and ESPN. Setting this configuration up and monitoring it, which we do, is an ongoing challenge, but paramount to the site's ongoing success.

Good Design. It's no Fantasy.

While the site's strength lies in the content and each writer's loyal following, there are several unique features on the site that really set NFP apart from others in the industry. And that starts with their Fantasy Football Draft Guide. The draft guide was a piece we customized based off of their needs and goals, and like the rest of the site, it needed to be as powerful on the back end to update information, as it needed to be easy to navigate on the front end. The design is an extension of the look and feel of the rest of the site, but from a fantasy perspective, (being fantasy players ourselves) we tried making something much more intuitive and user friendly. And with additions like Ask Joe, their resident expert, it made their offering much more personalized to help people dominate their leagues. Hey, I'm in the playoffs!

For the Local Fan and Local Advertiser

As with any growing business, and publishing sites especially, there is a need for continual growth. And the first of many additional projects we have been working on with National Football Post is their Team Pages component. The purpose for the Team pages is to quarantine content per team, create polls per team, add in message boards for fans to share their feelings about the team, and ratings capabilities for fans to rate their coaches and players week to week. For now, this is just the beginning of a much larger plan for the Team Pages though. Eventually each team section will have more specific video coverage from tailgating communities, more user interaction, and an editor associated with each team page. This also opens the door for more geo targeted advertising opportunities for local or regional advertisers.