San Francisco was the first team to debut a redesigned site that conforms easily to mobile devices.
The NFL is revamping its 32 team websites to give them a more uniform look and make them far more mobile friendly. The first two — the Seattle Seahawks and San Francisco 49ers — launched last week, with all club sites expected to make the transition by training camp in mid to late July.
Teams will retain control over editorial and commerce decisions, though the NFL will offer editorial advice tied to its own data analysis.
“We as a best practice will make recommendations to them based on data we will see across 32 clubs or based on studies we have done,” said George Scott, NFL Media’s general manager of the Club Sites group. As an example, he said NFL Media might see a club gaining traction with a video series, and the league might recommend to a similar team that it should also produce them.
The key driver behind the relaunch is making the sites better formatted for mobile devices. Five years ago, more than half of the clicks on team websites came from desktop. Today, that figure has fallen precipitously, with mobile visitors now making up over 70 percent, Scott said. So that led to a mobile-first mentality.
“We had a mobile version of the sites, but it wasn’t responsive,” he said. “So, you had a desktop experience, and you had a mobile experience. Now if you are on your desktop and you shrink that site down, it will snap to a mobile version if you narrow the width of the site. That is the big difference. With one experience you can make it work for both desktop and mobile versus having to publish two separate sites basically.”
Many other leading sports websites, including ESPN, have similarly moved in recent years to designs that work well on smartphones and tablets as mobile-based traffic continues to surge.
Between August and January, the average monthly unique visitors to NFL team sites were 21.3 million, and to NFL.com 33.6 million. While Scott would not offer a figure, he said he expects those figures will grow because of the relaunch.
Bruin Sports Capital’s Deltatre is serving as the back-end provider for the project, having built the content management system that is underpinning the new websites.
Beyond making the sites easier to read on mobile devices, producing the content will be more efficient. Staffers will be able to use phones and iPads now to file content.
“Our authors can file content in a more timely manner,” said Kenton Olson, the Seahawks’ director of digital and emerging media. “But also down the line as the way people consume content becomes a little bit more fragmented, we are going to be able to syndicate our content to other places.” By this he means devices such as connected TVs and even future technologies, as content can now adapt visually to any device.
The team sites will look and feel more like NFL.com, though clubs will have the flexibility to alter the format. “There is definitely a common framework for all 32 teams,” Olson said. “But we have freedom within that framework.”
Certain elements like fonts and navigational tools will always be the same site to site. Video player speeds will also be far quicker.
Deltatre’s technology serving as the back-end system for the website enhances the existing relationship between Bruin and the NFL. Bruin also has a large role with NFL On Location, the NFL’s corporate hospitality business, and is marketing GamePass in Europe. GamePass offers live games in season overseas.
Staff writer Eric Fisher contributed to this report.
