Company Overview
Founded in 1977, the National Basketball Referees Association (NBRA) seeks to further the goals of several predecessors by advancing athletics, sportsmanship, basketball, and the quality of sports officiating. The NBA recognizes the NBRA as the sole bargaining unit for the referees with all NBA referees members of the NBRA. Today, the NBRA represents 62 referees and 13 retired referees.
Opportunity
Perennial Strategy Group (PSG) developed a public facing web site (probasketballrefs.com) to support the public relations activities of its client, the National Basketball Referees Association (NBRA.) This site’s target audience is a broad range of users who are interested in basketball referees. Given that PSG selected Swipht to initially rework the NBRA’s extranet site, it made sense to maintain the continuity and also engage Swipht for an overhaul of the NBRA’s internet site. Once again, similar needs prevailed.
Solution
PSG chose Swipht to assist with a solution when the firm originally selected for the work encountered difficulties in completing the task. The logical goal was to redesign the partially developed site from the ground up.
This new approach necessitated a complete overhaul of the back-end technology developed in DotNet. Because PSG had already formalized much of the initial information gathering, Swipht’s inception phase was greatly abbreviated. In addition, much of the information architecture that fed into the elaboration phase had also been completed but needed to be put into a standard format for validation, modification and development purposes.
As for a new creative design, Swipht reworked a preexisting composition, one originally designed for the extranet. Although some pieces were already in place, Swipht had to modify the new design for it to work seamlessly with the new architecture and layout, image and icon treatments, and the design for the inner pages of the site.
Results
PSG had already formalized their objectives for this site and the project’s success can be calculated by how well we met the original objectives. Swipht created a virtual community for people who are interested in referees and refereeing; Swipht provided multiple channels for the public to interact within the NBRA site, including access to news and events and a way for users to signup and pay for public events and a forum allowing users to communicate with referees.
Costs were kept low given that Swipht was able to use a 3rd party framework which allowed for rapid implementation with pre-built modules. With hardly any new code needing to be written, less cost was incurred. In addition, reduction in the web site’s total cost of ownership over the long term was achieved when we used .Net. DotnetNuke allowed for greater self-sufficiency in site maintenance when non-technical site administrators can add, edit and delete site pages and content and can also manage account information without relying on outside sources for assistance. Finally, Swipht also provided a means for preventing non-authorized users from accessing any portion of the website’s secured content for the referees extranet.
Technologies
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