Top-draw­er coach. Win­ning ath­letes. Dynam­ic cheer­lead­ers. Pas­sion­ate­ly devot­ed fans. There was a lot to love about the Kansas City Chiefs even before we redesigned the teams site. What the site lacked was a clean, coher­ent inter­face and a flex­i­ble pub­lish­ing sys­tem tai­lored to the needs of web, mar­ket­ing, and con­tent staff. So thats what we created.

Con­trast this before shot of the Kansas City Chiefs home page with the same page after our redesign. Among the sites prob­lems were:

• Visu­al clut­ter. Too many ele­ments com­pet­ing for atten­tion. Fans under­stood and used the web­site in spite of its drawbacks.
• Con­fus­ing nav­i­ga­tion. Labels were clear (a good thing) but fly-out menus inter­fered with usability.
• Old-school, non-stan­dards-based HTML for­mat­ting. This wast­ed user and serv­er band­width and made the site less acces­si­ble to fans using assis­tive soft­ware (such as screen read­ers or alter­na­tive brows­ing devices, such as web phones).

We cre­at­ed a clean, clear, strong­ly brand­ed design based on user needs and team visu­al attrib­ut­es. We also used web stan­dards to make the site fast-load­ing, easy to main­tain, and acces­si­ble to more browsers and types of devices. The CSS lay­out was incred­i­bly sophis­ti­cat­ed for its day; some­thing oth­er web design­ers would study while ana­lyz­ing the tech­niques. (For instance, they might exam­ine the way mul­ti­ple lev­els of nav­i­ga­tion are struc­tured in XHTML and pre­sent­ed in CSS.)

We then built a cus­tom pub­lish­ing sys­tem fea­tur­ing mul­ti­ple tiers of pow­er and con­trol, depend­ing on the users needs and knowl­edge. The sys­tem was flex­i­ble, expand­able, and easy to under­stand and useeven at its most advanced lev­els. Its intu­itive, no-brain­er qual­i­ty freed Chiefs staffers to focus on cre­at­ing great con­tent­now eas­i­er for Chiefs fans to find and enjoy.

Our responsibilities on this project

Com­pet­i­tive analy­sis; user needs analy­sis; graph­ic design; tem­plate pro­duc­tion; con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem design and devel­op­ment. Launched 15 Sep­tem­ber 2004.