Dave Campbell’s Texas Football: A Case Study
Ready to truly focus and improve the digital experience for their subscriber base, the Texas high school football icon, Dave Campbell’s Texas Football, reached out to us to discuss their goals, technology limitations, and long term vision. Running on Wordpress for many years, they were unaware of the multitude of options we could provide for administrative access, data organization, real-time updates and more. Working together, we achieved their goals through the following features.
Subscription Services
Dave Campbell’s Texas Football has long been a retail print publication. More recently, they have invested in providing more content to their online subscribers. No longer bound by the number of pages in a magazine, they have a never ending canvas to work with on the web. Working together, we created a streamlined subscription flow that provides the subscriber with a mailed copy of the print edition, in-depth analysis of high school talent in Texas, access to insider videos and archives, recruiting services, and insider picks of every high school game in Texas.
The biggest goal coming in is to maximize subscriptions (obviously), so identifying more ways to maximize unique content has been critical to the continued success of the new site.
Live Scoring
As Texans ourselves, we know how important it is to have live scoring updates for Friday night high school games. We designed this feature to withstand high traffic within a short time period. The first weekend we implemented this feature we had over 29,000 visits to the site overall, 18,500 visits to the Live Scoring Page with anywhere between 150–300 active users per minute. During the 2018 playoff games, 42,500 people visited the Live Scoring page in one day.
To ensure that the site could withstand such high traffic at one time, we utilized a number of features on Microsoft Azure’s cloud hosting infrastructure. First we configured auto-scale capabilities to turn additional servers on or off depending on the current volume of traffic. Additionally, we used a load balance feature to help direct new traffic to the server with the least volume of usage in real time. We also took advantage of SQL database performance reports and constantly found ways to improve data organization and manipulation over time as more data became available.
Heat Index Rankings
College football is serious business and knowing where your team stands within the rankings during the season is a must. Together with the team at Dave Campbell’s we developed the Texas College Football Heat Index that tallies up the results, winning streaks and point differentials of the last 10 games for every program in the state from Texas to Navarro.
Using DCTF’s formula, we dynamically generate the Heat Index at the completion of each team’s game, always keeping this index up to date in real time. Our ability to cross-link data throughout the site allows the Heat Index rankings to update site-wide on team pages as well as the Heat Index itself.
Recruiting Feature
Recruiting talent for college teams used to consist of calling coaches, visiting practices and watching highlight reels. Today college recruiting has taken on a life of its own. Between Twitter, Hudl, ESPN — you name it — recruiting is everywhere. With continued focus on Texas high school football, DCTF wanted to provide more coverage of the players in your communities and offer something no other service has: player honors and attributes.
Working with Dave Campbell’s we developed a backend recruiting system to help compile all relevant data about a player into one place. Beginning with the class of 2020, DCTF provides state wide rankings, positional rankings, star ratings, player descriptions, honors, attributes, colleges of interest, commitment status, and highlights.
Advertising Management System
Having pre-existing advertisers, the Dave Campbell’s team needed a way to manage the display of these partners without the use of third party plugins from Google or other advertising engines that wouldn’t work with existing ad partners. To achieve this, we developed a complete advertising management system where their marketing team has the ability to input graphics and variable information such as ad placement within the site, limits on impressions and clicks, and ad prioritization.
