Player Rater Case Study

BRIEF

The aim of Player Rater is to be a social website for AFL fans to share and express their views on the AFL and to offer users with community generated ratings and appraisals.  Player Rater will have a system for rating all AFL footballers, coaches, teams and umpires live and also provide a platform to share opinions on all aspects of the AFL. With a limited marketing budget, Player rater will rely on the social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter and the success of the website to generate word of mouth interest.

STRATEGY/DEVELOPMENT

Given the social aspect of this site and the potential for expansion and change, the site design needed to be flexible and focused on usability. With this in mind the design is very clean and modular, allowing panels to be dropped in/taken out wherever needed and a very simple, usable layout. This allows the content to be the feature of the site and the interface to handle it elegantly.

The custom backend for the site was developed with speed in mind, meaning rapid expansion in site traffic could be handled and wouldn’t slow down the site.

Forums were developed and a thread attached to each player, team, coach, umpire and game. This encourages comments, which can be made from just about anywhere in the site.

Given the importance of word of mouth site traffic, SEO was especially important for player rater so the site could easily be found and to get extra users via searches for AFL related keywords. Because of this the structure of the site was strategically set up to enhance the natural rankings in various areas such as player and team name searches. While a more comprehensive SEO strategy is planned for later development, initial rankings are very promising.

RESULTS

Although only early in its first season of operation, Player Rater has been well received by the many AFL fans that have come across the site. Users are coming back each week, rating lots of players and comments on the forums are growing with each week.

View the website »