BassMaster.com is a popular and well-established brand in the media industry, and a leader in coverage of bass angler tournaments. When we began working with BassMaster their existing website did not appropriately convey their persona, and our goal was to up the ante in terms of their online presence.
We kicked off UX research with primary target audience members, Bassmaster's internal team, and extensive design & UX brainstorming to ensure this fun and energetic online brand matched its offline personality.
“One of the unique aspects of this effort was BassMaster's existing style guide,” said the engagement’s project manager, Joel Sackett. “They had completed an extensive process that dictated how their brand should be visually represented, but it hadn’t been implemented on the web. We took that road map and expanded upon it with the re-launch.”
By utilizing OpenPublish, we were able to deliver a great publishing toolkit that instantly improved the websites back-end usability, while at the same time providing front-end content flexibility to the editorial staff. Another challenging angle was the amount of traffic the site received. As such, the new site required extensive load testing to support its more than 20 million visitors each month. In fact, during tournament weekends, BassMaster.com can easily attract more than 5 million page-views a day.
To capitalize on the heavy inbound traffic, we ensured that advertising opportunities and tournament-related content were front-and-center. Users can engage on the site using Facebook capabilities of “liking” and commenting.
We also balanced the visual design by incorporating a 1-column header image to showcase the latest catches making headlines without superseding other direct-revenue-generating elements of the site.
Visual design work was lead by Phase2 designer Laura Schoppa, who commented on the design process, “We took a lot of design cues from the magazine, such as incorporating a prominent logo, mixing the outdoorsy vibe with modern elements, and using more of yellow tones. We also created an interface that treated each element in visually unique ways, like using tabbed blocks or small rotators with darker backgrounds, for example.”
These elements were complemented with new ways of surfacing content, such as “The Latest,” which culls tips, trends, topics, and tournament info that site visitors want to know about, re-vamped feature rotators, and vastly improved SOLR based searching capabilities.
To serve video streaming capabilities for tournaments, there is a live module with an embedded player to stream video of BassMaster's events. Additionally, we rebuilt (in Drupal) the record-keeping results that enable users to view information about their favorite anglers as well sift through historical tournament data that goes back decades. This content migration was a challenge, but it was also important to maintain BassMaster's legacy as the leader in this space.
All-in-all, the project was considered a resounding success. We know, because the newly added Facebook commenting allowed end-users to tell everyone exactly how they felt, and the response was overwhelmingly positive! And if you are interested in learning more, check out Lessons Learned: Building BassMaster:com with OpenPublish and Acquia Cloud.
