Netsync: Soccer Crazy Media Group
The fictitious Soccer Crazy Media Group (SCMG) would have several concerns broken up to the following:
- Visual Design & Layout
- Database Design
- Multiple Language Support
- Content Linking
- Content Management
- Ticketing Sales & Fulfilment
- Infrastructure
Visual Design & Layout
To capture the global audience of soccer fans, a sleek and elegant yet user-friendly and straightforward user interface needs to be designed. Incorporating various elements (like ads, search, player profiles, etc) that an SCMG Web admin can control by moving, turning on or off etc.
However, the visual design and layout will be important, but will not define its success.
Database Design
A well designed database which will house the requirements of linking players with teams, their histories, match results, global league standings and various other elements will pose to be a challenge. For instance, a tournament (league or world cup) will be made up of teams. Those teams may well also participate in more than one tournament like the "English Football League" and the "European Cup" for instance. Then, those teams are made up of players who again, can play for multiple teams.
Below is a simple illustration of how the database model may look.
Multiple language support
All elements of the Web site whether if its an article or a player profile will be made to support multiple languages. Each piece of content will be linked to its associated language. These languages however, should rely on editorial translated input, not automatically generated from various language converters out in the market place.
Each article can also support multiple images that may or may not consist of language dependant elements. As far as the user experience is concerned, they choose the appropriate language at the very first session on the Web site. They will then be served that language from there onwards (depending on that language's availability).
Content linking
Every article should be able to link with any of the available elements in the database. For instance, if an article is about a particular soccer match, there should be links in the content itself linking to teams, players or tournaments. This gives great levels of interaction for the end user, which would almost guarantee to increase the levels of retaining and attracting users. Similarly, when users are at the tournament home page, there are links to match results, teams and so forth.
We would also implement some content writing tools that will assist inserting these links into the content without having to know where they are. It would help writing the articles a lot easier.
Content management
A sophisticated Content Management system will be part of the entire database. Below are key features, which will incorporate:
- Security - users/ roles (writer, editor, manager)
- Work-flow management (where content is managed, approved/declined, check-in/check-out)
- Version control & history
- Scheduling (when articles should be published and expire)
- Multi language support (see above)
- Template management
These features will be entirely browser-based so scalability is not an issue across a wide and secure intranet/extranet.
Ticketing Sales and Fulfilment
We would be looking at integrating with an existing ticketing organisation and will be looking at ways to obtain real time pricing and availability. This would entirely depend on the B2B features that the ticketing organisation exposes so we would be limited to that.
Our aim is to seamlessly integrate with them so users would not be directed to another site suddenly. Technologies we would preferably use here would include Microsoft's Biztalk Server where XML/SOAP is the underlying transport. However, we remain flexible if the ticketing organisation exposes different methods.
Infrastructure
We are Microsoft specialists. We would be looking at utilising the .NET framework to implement this solution. Web services will be across load balanced servers (stateless and session-less architecture) to ensure high-availability and scalability. All server hardware to have Raid-5 capability and a shared SAN-based storage for dynamic files.
The database would reside on SQL Server 2000 with its Fail-over Clustering capability, again for high-availability.
Part of any of our solutions, we also look at the development life cycle of development, staging and finally production deployment plans. We look at ways to make deployment of updates with the least impact to the entire service.
Conclusion
Based on the limited scope of the scenario, we would be looking at a time frame of between 14 to 16 weeks for a completed project. As part of our philosophy, we share success with clients by reducing costs and placing a performance bonus at the successful completion of project within the agreed time frame.
