Building upon the strategies developed and experienced learned from the SummerSlam and Behind Enemy Lines microsite projects, I approached the development of this microsite with one objective that's two-fold: to combine user experience with monetization and organization. Creating a site that is as grandeur as the event itself goes without saying, but in light of recent financial calamities and managements stance on "not giving up a single penny", I had to come up with creative ways to generate revenue without hampering the experience on the site. To accomplish that, I brought a trick I learned from the BELC site. I expanded on the video player I built for BELC and integrated two companion ads for it (a 768x90 and 300x250). Therefore, not only could the video generate revenue from the pre-rolled commercials that ran before the website intro, but it also produced incremental ad-revenue from those two banners. Additionally, a problem that was identified during the information architecture and site planning stage was the sheer amount of links and information that comes with being the biggest event of the year. Displaying a link for each section simply would not do. For simplicity sake, we separated and organized each set of links by main content, sponsored content, and additional features. That way, users can easily identify where they want to go and what their interests are.

Although not entirely a full website (all links go to external pages), this was a fun problem-solving use case and we learned a lot from this exercise. I especially learned a lot about video compression and 3D rendering (thanks to our co-designer and intro creator extraordinaire Chris Connelly), ad integration and due to some interesting JS-Flash/Flash-JS implementations that was necessary, I learned a lot about cross browser/platform issues - and boy was that fun... not (I still hate IE).

Launch Gallery