UT Sports TV
University of Tennessee Athletics department wanted a modern and stylish website to show off their amazing video work and engage fans. I was responsible for developing the back-end built off of WordPress, front-end development and the design itself.
The site is currently averaging several thousand hits a day and has been a great success. UTSports.tv is also a fine example of using data to refine the site and continued development.
- A customized version of flowplayer was used for high quality playback.
- Automatic playlist with voting integrated into it.
- The whole site is set on a strict grid for consistency throughout.
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Choosing WordPress
The format of the site seemed to go well with the WordPress "posts" structure, we talked about some specialized video systems but none of them gave us the flexibility we wanted. Time was also a factor, ideally I would've liked to create a custom CMS but we had a very limited time to launch the site before football season started. WordPress has worked out perfectly on the site and we'll be sticking with it for future revisions.
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First Steps
The site started as a bit of an experiment. The UT team does some amazing video work but didn't have an online home for them. Mark Billingsby wanted to change that, and took the initiative to start the site. After plenty of politicking the site got green lit. We spent a good amount of time planning everything out carefully, this cut down design and development time considerably. The site launched on time and now has plans to expand in the future.