Wsportsmedia Multisite

A comprehensive and elastic approach to product development as the goal of our client’s satisfaction

Wsportsmedia is an international sport business firm founded in 2014 with HQ in Höganäs Sweden, and offices in Stockholm, Östersund, Tampere Finland, Oslo Norway and Joinville Brazil.
The firm operates across the sport business value chain with international media productions, media rights distribution, management of international sport events and athlete representation.

Challenge

The challenge in building a large product related to other 4-Multisite Platform services was primarily time – the final date was the start of the winter season. It was a great difficulty to obtain all the data from the currently existing websites on the basis of which the website could fully function. Another aspect was creating a website in 4 languages – the differences in the length of the translations required us to adjust the page depending on the language used.

The main technical challenge was integration with external services such as Vimeo or external user management support.

Solution

The platform itself includes number of solutions for winter sports fans. It is supposed to be a magazine with news about sports events, equipment and its rating on a scale or advice on training or even taking care of your own equipment. The main service of the platform was also being enriched with the ability to display live sports results, lists of sports events with an independent description and history of results from several years ago. Additionally, the site was supposed to present the current representation and teams for each language service. Everything was to be linked to a simplified form of the store with specific parameters for specific sports equipment, expert assessment and access to the podcast on winter sports carried out by Wsportsmedia. Registered users also have the option of registering sports events in the form of a registration form, which, after being sent, is verified by the Wsportsmedia team – and, if necessary, is supplemented with the necessary data before being shown on the home page.

Design

The client needed us to fully understand the subject of winter sports, as well as the vision of the message that the website is to fulfill.

• From the UX perspective, essential was placing the most important functionalities of the website in the main view so that they were understandable and easily accessible, i.e .:
• Current ranking of the highest ranking athletes
• Calendar of upcoming sports events with the most important information and the ability to switch directly to live viewing or retransmission of the past event
• The latest thematic articles, including a section where articles covering the most important topics will be imposed
• One of the most important aspects was cleverly and elegantly locating the ads that are the main source of the website’s maintenance

As users of the sports platform Wsportsmedia use both laptops and phones to follow current events in the world of winter sports, in the mobile version it was important to place a block with the nearest events, such as a collapsible menu. Thanks to this solution, the user can completely minimize the section, but it is still available regardless of the subpage on which the user is located.

Article view respects the width of the article text column to make it easier for the user to read. A mandatory element of this view is the section with similar articles from a given category and other categories to keep the user for longer.

4-Multisite website

Each language side provides a different color layer, the final colors of which have been carefully selected in cooperation with the client. They indirectly represent the colors of the flag of the country in which the website is translated. The English version, the so-called International, emphasizes the theme of the platform by using blue as the color dominant.
One of the most important views, right on the main news page, is the article view. Here, it was necessary to design a window in the form of an adblocker, which would inform users who are not logged in or people without a subscription and the limit imposed on access to the content of the website. The main purpose is to encourage the user to take advantage of the subscription plan.

Technology

We decided to base everything on the well-known CMS – WordPress. However, this was not a typical WordPress installation, we used Bedrock as a boilerplate. For this we used a number of plugs, including ACF and WP All Import. With such a large and complicated project, it was necessary to write our own plugins / solutions for, f.e.:

• downloading live sports results and displaying them in various sections of the website
• paywall, which was responsible for handling the access of users who purchased the appropriate subscriptions

Another element was the import of data from old pages, these pages were based on various content management systems such as WordPress or Joomla. We focused on a universal solution of data import to our system.
It was a big challenge to prepare integration between users who set up their accounts, externally, not with us in the system, and to manage their access to external services such as Vimeo. We used the KeyCloak middleware – which translates user data that is sent via various communication protocols (SAML). This solution allowed us to integrate different providers with different protocols, users log in only once through our websites and have access to various services.
Finally, there are issues of perfomance on all sides, both on the user and on the infrastructure side. Here we used solutions such as Redis, AWS Cloudwatch, AWS CloundFront, Elastic Load Balancing.

Summary

At the very beginning of the project, the scope of the project and the final structure of the website were not fully known, which resulted in constant changes and extensions. Thanks to mutual cooperation, it was possible to close the anticipated scope, systematize a large amount of information and start development.

Our client had a predetermined date – the beginning of the winter season – therefore we had to implement appropriate methods of cooperation with the client and an appropriate system for conducting work on the product. It was necessary to have a flexible approach to programming work. On the one hand, we needed to keep the basic principles of Scrum for the process, but we also wanted the client (who was demanding as to the final effect) to see the progress of our work and be able to finally start on the assumed date.

The biggest difficulty was to integrate with external services that communicate in various formats. This was achieved using the KeyCloak tool. This allows the user to log in once and have access to all dependent services.