Project Overview
Tribal Football is an online mecca for everything soccer, with a huge database of over 500, 000 articles and 100+ pieces of soccer content, news and articles published daily. Their reach covers all major leagues and clubs internationally, from the English Premier League to the A-League, and everything in between.
We were engaged to reimagine the Tribal Football site, crafting new digital strategy, design and build to increase user-retention, reduce business costs, and dramatically improve revenue and inventory optimisation.
The result is a beautifully easy-to-use and exceptionally content-rich site, with an audience of over 55 million visitors a year - engaging an enormous community of soccer fans around the world.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Creative Director - Mack Nevill
Senior Designer - Warren Everard
Project Manager - Ryan Luxmoore
Technical Lead - Mark Seddon
Backend Developers - Romain Palmas, Arjen Schwarz, Ryan Djurovich
Frontend Developers - Matt Cordell, David Pike, Kathryn Rollins, Killian Lippa
Project Brief
How do you make 55 million readers happy?
With a massive audience of diehard football fans, it was always going to be a challenge to overhaul this storied website property, with a massive database of over 500,000 articles and a huge taxonomy of leagues, clubs, players and stats spanning the entire spectrum of the world game.
Our engagement was to completely overhaul the Tribal Football website and deliver a revitalised, fully responsive site that would engage football fans the world over and make Tribal a one-stop destination for football news.
From a strategy perspective, we also had to re-monetise the property and incorporate advertising that would drive revenue whilst keeping the user experience as elegant as possible.
Project Innovation/Need
The new Tribal website has led other global football news outlets the world over in delivering a new, personalised experience for sports fans with the design and implementation of My Tribe - giving football fans the ability to tailor their own news content according to their favourite clubs and leagues.
This new level of personalised content allows the user to customise their content in ways never seen before at this scale, presenting a tailored view of user-selected content that facilitates better discovery and engagement by bringing users closer to the key content that interests them.
We also developed custom algorithms to drive “Popular Stories” content on the website, including a number of weighting factors such as popularity, velocity, and recency into the equation, analysing data from the Google Analytics API to surface most relevant content for users.
Design Challenge
Our initial design challenge was capturing the rawness of the Tribal brand with an refresh that would resonate with the audience while respecting the history of the brand and its authenticity. We embarked on a design process to capture the spirit of the identity, iterating through various treatments and then refining to arrive at the final logo.
The website itself presented a huge challenge in terms of its sheer magnitude; over 55 million users a year, 500,000 articles, and an enormously broad range of content across a plethora of clubs and leagues. This had to be architected into an elegant and personalised experience for diehard football fans who were hungry for the latest content, across a range of devices.
Technically, the site needed to cope with massive load, but had to be run economically as well, requiring a new solution to be architected that would deliver massive scale at low cost. The site was rebuilt on a tech stack comprising an n-tier Symfony API & application (along with a Go micro-service), using Amazon RDS as our database server (Multi-AZ), Nginx, and Varnish/Cloudflare as our caching layer.
User Experience
Tribal Football now has a best of breed, revitalised presence as a global player in football news, with a slick website providing a comprehensive wealth of news, personalised content and more on a cutting edge auto-scaling platform built for growth.
Digital Experience - Website - Brand
This award celebrates innovation and creativity in design of a unique user experience in the combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity content for websites. Consideration given to clarity of communication and the matching information style to audience.
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