This isn’t so much a regular blog item as a case study. We felt it worthy of inclusion as we’re quite proud of our work on this one. Huge respect to Phil!
Dexerto.com
Dexerto is a big brand name in the world of eSports (competitive gaming). It brings professional journalist reporting, advertising and industry statistics to this exceptionally large global community. The brief for the new website was highly complex and required extensive consideration with its execution.
The bulk of the task was to develop a group of sub-sites to cater for different regions and dialects, namely English, Spanish, French and German at first. All sites needed to be under one administrative roof and share core data, while remaining independent for their respective audiences. WordPress multi-site combined with a custom information hierarchy provided the tools needed.
A complex sub-structure provides select games with yet an extra form of micro-site of their own, complete with unique news, features, event reporting, result feeds and focused information. Admin users can be assigned to specific parts of each sub/micro-site for dedicated editorial control.
Another major aspect of the build was combining a series of several forums, together containing 100,000+ users and millions of posts. Bringing this all under one CMS platform was an extensive and rewarding task. The result is a community rich in social features and interactive functions. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call it the Facebook of eSports!
Advertising plays a large role in the support of the site. A fully integrated ad suite was implemented, incorporating targeted adzones and ad placement throughout the site. Intricate control is enabled via ad display on a per-post basis were required, with some statistics available to admin.
As always, the same level of care has been taken when developing the back-office as that of the front-end. The content is of a complex nature and management of data such as match results, player performance statistics, event placement records and even player transfers had to be intuitive and sustainable.
The scale of the project took us by surprise a little. The complexity grew as each new function was added. We’re particularly pleased with how the whole site works as a unit. Data is shared, accessed and managed without confusion, from a user-experience point of view and that of back-end data-flow.