Project Overview

Client: Big League Dreams
Live Site URL: http://www.bigleaguedreams.com
Development time: 6 months

Big League Dreams is a developer and operator of amateur recreational sports facilities in the United States. Acknowledged as the "Best Sports Complex in America" by the Sportsplex Operators and Developers Association, BLD features scaled-down replicas of famous ballparks such as Boston's Fenway Park and New York's Yankee Stadium to accommodate youth and adult sports across the west coast. From indoor soccer to corporate events, BLD offers an opportunity and a benefit to all who encounter one of their ten locations.

Development Team

Developer: Basic Brand Studios
Developer URL: http://www.basicbrandstudios.com

Developer Bio: Basic Brand Studios is a branding and full-service creative studio that helps companies start-up and launch new things. It has a focus on maximizing brand value and increasing client profits. The company is based in San Diego, California, USA.

Development Team:
Matt Faulk, Brand & Creative Director: Strategy, Vision, Design Direction
Tarik Assagai, Technical Director: Programming, Functionality Planning
Dave Tidler, Project Manager: Client Management, Production
Shawn Homen, Designer: Production

Meeting the Challenge

The Big League Dream website had an outdated look, and its presence was not in line with the new brand direction. The company sought to boost the online experience that their visitors encountered when visiting the site. To achieve this goal, a new site build was in order. The previous site architecture had various navigational, visual, and technical errors.

Creating the Solution

After creating a site feature list, Basic Branding determined which components would help it save the most time. Because the architecture called for a single parent site with ten 10 micro sites (and more planned) of ball park locations, simplicity of future updates was crucial. The developer did not want to update ten or more templates each time the customer had a need for a design update. To maintain a unique administrator login for each "micro site" sports complex location, it implemented the JMS Multi Site component.

Other required features:

• Short and long titles for each item
• A module to display multiple content types and include the short title
• Accordion Menu
• Unique header images per page
• Image gallery per park profile
• Forms that can easily be inserted into multiple content items, but managed from a single item
• Advanced tournament search with an admin screen to add/delete tournaments
• News section
• Photo & Video gallery on the same screen

The entire project was completed without developing any custom components and only a few custom modules. The versatility of Joomla! and large selection of components gave Basic Brand many options when it came to solutions for the feature requirements. "What we had to take into consideration was the fact that a non-technical team would be responsible for the content updates. We did not want to confuse them by forcing them to learn different components to manage, news, static content, and park profiles. K2 by JoomlaWorks allowed us to create different content types and allow the admin to manage everything from a single admin interface," said Dave Tidler, Project Manager for Basic Brand Studios. "The only issue that we ran into was the ability to manage media between the multi-sites with a single installation of K2. We were able to modify a few files responsible for the media storage in order to force a new folder per sub-domain."

Extensions Used

• K2 (by JoomlaWorks)
• Blue Flame Forms For Joomla (forms)
• Fabrik (tournament system)
• SimpleTabs (by JoomlaWorks)
• Tabs & Slides (by JoomlaWorks)
• Multi Site (by JMS2Win)
• Simple Image Gallery Pro (by JoomlaWorks)
• AllVideos (by JoomlaWorks)

Outcome

The project was a huge sucess and Big League Dreams couldn't be happier. As a result of the rebuild, the visitor's experience has been greatly enhanced, and site metric improvements include increased time on site, higher click through rates, and lowered bounce rates. Said Matt Faulk, Brand & Creative Director for Basic Brand Studios, "We rely heavily on Joomla! for our CMS website development. We love being a part of a large community. It gives us access to resources that we otherwise would have to create in-house."

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