Umbraco web development: 31% rise in match viewership, coupled with a 24% growth in merchandise sales

Innowise has developed a fully responsive football club website featuring live broadcasts, news, merchandise sales, and match ticketing services.

Customer

Industry

Marketing, Sport

Region

Client since

2021

Innowise worked on a project for a popular EU-based football club. Detailed information about the client cannot be disclosed under the provisions of the NDA.

Challenge

The client wanted to improve its online presence and PR, which included the development of a high-quality website for selling merchandise, sharing news with fans, monitoring match schedules, and purchasing tickets.

A major problem was that club members often received fan requests to centralize the latest information about games and team changes. Additionally, the team’s merchandise was not distributed online, so the club needed a quick and convenient e-commerce solution for T-shirt sales and delivery within England.

Our main objective was to combine all the necessary features in one site, including ticket information from third-party services, and live broadcasts of the matches.

We chose Umbraco as a CMS due to its ease of use, open source nature, regular updates, and integration with third-party services necessary for the project. In addition, Umbraco websites are known for their seamless integration capabilities, which will be helpful for further site updates.

A summary of the scope of work is as follows:

Umbraco web development including news, team and sponsor information sections;
integration of third-party services for buying tickets;
integration of a streaming service to broadcast matches in real-time;
development of an online store for merchandise selling and delivery.

Solution

Our team completed the project and delivered a fully responsive Umbraco-based website featuring a classic homepage with a news section, a merchandise store with a beautiful manually operated carousel promoting T-shirts, a section with tickets information, and an integrated live streaming player.

Merch store

Our team has developed a simple and convenient section for purchasing merchandise. The scope of work included setting up a store, displaying a merchandise carousel, implementing a shopping cart, and integrating a payment gateway.

We chose Mercello as an e-commerce solution – an easily integrated open-source platform built natively for Umbraco. The integrated Stripe payment gateway allows customers to quickly pay for their items after selecting the size and adding them to their carts. The purchased goods can be delivered within England using standard delivery which takes 2-3 working days to arrive. We have set up an admin panel in the store to track data on goods, prices, orders and deliveries.

News section

We added a news section using a pre-built Umbraco plugin. The news module allows authorized individuals to create new content for immediate or scheduled publication, as well as set up posting to other channels. To publish a news article, they must log into the CMS with the admin or manager permissions. The system was configured to automatically push new articles to social media networks such as Facebook or Twitter.

We are currently working on integrating analytical and marketing tools in the news panel for more efficient content management.

Integration with ticketing services

We integrated the website with third-party APIs of ticketing services to retrieve up-to-date information about available tickets, prices, and seating arrangements for team matches. In this way, fans can keep track of dates, times, stadiums for upcoming games, and ticket availability. When searching for tickets for a specific match, the site displays links to third-party resources for purchasing.

Live streaming

Integrating functionality for watching football matches in real-time was a complex task that involved working with the live-streaming technology, content delivery networks, and video players. Here are some general steps that were taken:

Selecting a streaming service. Our development team used DAZN, a streaming service specializing in live sports streaming.
Setting up a content delivery network (CDN).
Video stream embedding. We have embedded the live video streaming feature into the website using a video player, compatible with all major web browsers.

We have integrated several analytics and monitoring tools into the website to track the number of views, the streaming quality, and any issues that may arise during the live stream.

This integration resulted in a user-friendly and easily accessible platform that allows fans to conveniently watch matches live in one place, regardless of the location.

Technologies & tools

Back-end

.NET5, ASP.NET Web API, Entity Framework, OAuth2, JWT

Front-end

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Video.js

Databases

MS SQL Server

Platforms

Umbraco CMS 9

Cloud

AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), AWS Simple; Storage Service (S3), AWS CloudFront, AWS RDS

Integrations

Stripe

DevOps

GitHub Actions

xUnit, Selenium

Process

It took our team four months to develop the MVP of the website with the core functionality of displaying news, information about teams, official partners, and ticket availability. Following that, we added a merch store and broadcast player, which took another four months to implement. Our developers kept the website up to date by continually introducing new tools and updating the user UI/UX with responsive layouts. Currently, the team is supporting and revising the site and developing additional marketing tools for advanced content analysis. The entire project workflow was based on the Agile methodology. We communicated with the client and the team via Google Chat.

Team

Front-End Developer

Full-Stack Developers

UI/UX Designer

QA Engineer

Project Manager

DevOps Engineer

Business Analyst

Results

Innowise developers created a user-friendly football club website combining the functions of an online store, a news portal, a sports tickets tracker, and match broadcasting. The development of the site contributed to the club’s strong online presence and its effective interaction with the community. A centralized system for merchandise purchases and ticket tracking increased sales by 24% and match viewership by 31%.

The website played a critical role in supporting the client’s global PR strategy by facilitating core marketing activities such as campaign planning, communications with sponsors, and holding sports events.

Project duration

May 2022 - in progress

Related cases

Contact us!

Book a call or fill out the form below and we’ll get back to you once we’ve processed your request.

What happens next?

Having received and processed your request, we will get back to you shortly to detail your project needs and sign an NDA to ensure the confidentiality of information.

After examining requirements, our analysts and developers devise a project proposal with the scope of works, team size, time, and cost estimates.

We arrange a meeting with you to discuss the offer and come to an agreement.

We sign a contract and start working on your project as quickly as possible.