Leaderboards will have a lower profile but major stories and the players themselves will receive more attention when pgatour.com relaunches June 21, two days after the U.S. Open.
After the redesign, tournament leaderboards will be moved to the left of the home page and top stories will head up the layout every day. Leaderboards, however, will be enhanced to include features such as text play-by-play for each golfer, data from the tour’s ShotLink data system, and statistics on the current action on the course.
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| A preview of the redesigned pgatour.com. |
The tour increasingly has been promoting a wider group of its players, and the Web site’s new focus will give coverage wherever compelling stories happen, according to Lee Bushkell, general manager of the site. The relaunch is being handled by the tour and its production and promotion partner, SportsLine.com.
“We wanted to shine a spotlight on our greatest assets: the players and the events,” he said. “My belief is that these are the story and the scores are part of that story. Is a top player struggling to make the cut? Is a no-name charging to take the lead?”
To promote the relaunch and new tour partner XM Satellite Radio, the site will stream XM’s 24 hours of weekly tournament coverage free for the first month.
The revamp is the first in two years and the second since SportsLine.com took over in 2001 with a four-year deal that was renewed last year. As part of it, regular sections are now available for presenting sponsorships, similar to what sites like nba.com and mlb.com have done for some time. Bushkell could not give details on potential section sponsors, but said the tour will continue to pitch site ad packages to current tour sponsors and others starting at roughly $50,000 a month. Deals can reach into the mid-six figures annually, Bushkell said.
Only four current PGA Tour sponsors have category exclusivity on the site — Cialis, IBM, Charles Schwab and MasterCard — and all but Schwab are “significant clients” of the site, Bushkell said. Schwab also has a site presence through its large deal with the Champions Tour.
The tour’s deal with SportsLine.com ends in 2006, but Bushkell said the tour has no desire to package the site into the new television deals that will begin in 2007 and will be negotiated later this year.
The site gets roughly 2 million unique visitors a month and can get 1 million uniques on an average tournament day, according to figures from Internet research firm Omniture. Roughly 60 percent of its users log in from work, and 82 percent of them are now on broadband.
