ESPN Australia website rebuild

ESPN, Inc. is the world’s leading multinational, multimedia sports entertainment company featuring a portfolio of over 50 multimedia sports assets. The espn.com.au site was redesigned and rebuilt to position it as the premium source for information regarding ESPN programming and content for the Australasian region.

The main objective of the new site was to highlight the full range of sports and programming available, to make the programming data available in real-time, and to provide easy entry points for new subscribers to the service.

The site was built using the Silverstripe CMS platform, and integrated scheduling data from the ESPN API feed.

Screenshots

Build Details

By far the most complicated part of the project was integrating the forward planned programming data into an easy to use, visually pleasing display. To limit the load on the ESPN API we set up a scheduled task which would poll the API for new or changed programming data from the last poll interval. Each polling of the API would update the local programming schedule database.

The local programming schedule database was exposed through a custom API which was queried from the front end of the website to display scheduling data in various formats.

  • Quick View and Full SchedulesBoth schedules display a 2 hours window of programming across the three programming channels. The schedule contains data from the current time through to the end of the current day, then for the full 24 hours for the next 6 days. The programming can be scrolled though in 15 minute or  1 hour steps. The data for future days is only loaded in via AJAX once the end of the displayed day has been reached.
  • Program FinderThe program finder enables visitors to quickly search for current and future programming data for a particular sport. The search directly accesses the local programming schedule database to return results.
  • Up Next ScheduleThe sidebar Up Next Schedule was built to provide an instant view of the next scheduled programme for any sport. Changing the selected sport retrieves new data via an AJAX call to the local scheduling API. A modified version of the widget displays the currently airing and immediately following programmes so that visitors can quickly see what is on now, and what’s on next.

Build Team

Backend Developers

  • Scott Swabey
  • Paul Mcilwaine

Frontend Developers

  • Scott Swabey
  • Mitermayer Reis

Designers

  • Ben Thayer
  • Chris Jeffree

Project Manager

  • Jo Cooper

Creative

  • John Gault
  • Ben Heath

Account Services

  • Alexander Southwick

Build Tools

Backend

  • PHP 5.3
  • Silverstripe
  • Apache 2.2
  • MySQL 5

Frontend

  • HTML5
  • CSS3
  • jQuery
  • modernizr
  • jQuery UI

Tools

  • Netbeans
  • Notepad2
  • Photoshop CS5.5

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