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FAI
A world class sports website for Ireland's football fans
Project brief
The Football Association of Ireland (FAI) is the sports governing body in the Republic of Ireland. Football is the biggest sport in the country with 450,000 active participants nationwide, 2,452 clubs across 90 Leagues, 13 Affiliates, 160 International Games each year, 170 full-time staff, and a turnover of €50 million per annum. The FAI has responsibility for the Domestic and International Teams, Grassroots, Women's Development, Player Development, FAI Education and Coaching and Social Inclusion.
The FAI’s existing website was no longer fit for purpose - it did not support multimedia, it had no social media integration, and was not responsive to cater to traffic from mobile devices. They wanted to build a best in class sports website that would engage the Irish Football fan base using FAI and UEFA generated content.
Our Solution
We built a brand new responsive website for the FAI using Drupal 7 as the content delivery platform. The new site showcases both the International and Domestic teams, accessed from the homepage. The project methodology involved our initial discovery process, consulting and business analysis, front end design, and Drupal custom development.
As the project kicked off, we undertook a detailed discovery process to understand the scope of the project and outline specific user requirements. Through discovery and design workshops with both the internal stakeholders of the FAI, and the website’s audience, we were able to identify comprehensive personas, user journeys, and precise internal needs of the FAI to publish, manage and maintain content on the site.
From the initial requirements analysis and user experience design, our technical team built a new condensed information architecture to deliver on these specific user journeys. The new Drupal framework provided the FAI with a highly effective platform to serve content and statistics on competitions, teams, matches, players and seasons.
The contribution of Monsoon Consulting was invaluable throughout the development. Their expertise in user interface design, Drupal development, and server configuration helped ensure we were able to successfully deliver a state of the art website, to the benefit of Irish football fans worldwide.
Impact and Results
The new enterprise content management platform delivered on the FAI’s primary objective of building a best in class sports website to engage Ireland’s football fan base the Irish Football fan base, using FAI and UEFA generated content.
Drupal provides the internal website editors with easy content editing tools, giving them the capacity to update large amounts of stats in real-time. The addition of a social wall has improved engagement with football fans on social media. Furthermore, the overall information architecture and site structure are better targeted to the FAI’s target audience.
We continue to provide managed support services to the Drupal-built www.fai.ie, their payments application built on Magento payments.fai.ie, as well as all their internally hosted environments for application hosting.
