Project overview
The silver group has decided to create a website dedicated to the sports fans of Chicago. This site will provide up to date information on H.S., College and professional teams. Our site will serves as a small social network where people can share information about teams, post reactions to games, or make plans with friends to attend a sporting event. The primary function of the site is to provide a daily schedule of sporting events in the Chicago metropolitan area not matter what type of sport it is. Users will have the ability to create profiles, chose a favorite team, or sport. Our aim is to provide sports fans with everything they need to know about Chicago sports.
Value proposition for the Web and mobile site
Customers should use or or site because they can fulfill all of their sporting needs in one destination. If you are a die hard sports fan, sports writer, recruiter, coach , or even a team manager this site will be the best place to find all you need to know about Chicago sports. By providing a day by day schedule fans can decide which sporting even is best suited for them. We add value by providing exposure to teams that otherwise would have no form of advertisement.
Category of E-Commerce
This project is intentional to grab different level sports lover so that it will be driven as customer-based segmentation. As a sports news portal, the website will be designed for people to review the latest information without going to several related websites. Therefore, what content on the page attracting people who like sports related activities is important for us to design the performance elements on the web pages. We can use web analysis tools, like Google Analytics, to get the statistics from different component of the web site and understand visitor preferences for web page improvement. On the other side, knowing visitor profiles facilitates us to catch specific advertisement company as the website revenue.
Similar sites
The following websites are different sports related portal, and there are some similar components with our project:
CSNchicago.com -- CSNchicago.com shows Chicago area various sports events. It categorizes with different teams not sports. The front page distributes the recent games in time tables with daily and weekly based, representatively. There are providing the essential components: news article, reporter comment, and interview videos.
Chicago Tribune sports -- As the sports section of Chicago Tribune, the webpage shows the sports news and columns articles. The menu includes college level news. Here provides not only the weekly game table but also the current games score board. In addition, using the imbedded live clips is facilitating to catch visitors' eyes.
CBS sports -- Like Chicago Tribune, CBS provides the news articles and similar category style. But visitor can surf the latest article title in front page panel. And it also shows up the union level update sticker.
WGNtv.com -- WGNtv.com lists each team's the game schedule in near future on the front page. And it gives a number of different sports pictures in the gallery links.
New York Post sports -- New York Post aggregates the latest news stream no matter what kind of sports. It includes high school level news. Integrate with ebay's ticket dealer for people to choose. There is a team tracker let people can track the record of games.
Newsday sports -- Newsday provides both college and high school level sports news into individual page. There is also a wide score board at the top of page. Some article needs people to subscribe to Newsday in free.
Intended customers
This website is really guided towards anyone whom has interest of any sport in Chicago. The website will incorporate any team from High School all the way to the Professional levels. This really broadens our horizon's when it comes to our intended customers. One age group we will be targeting is High School students (14-19). They can come to our site for the schedule or score of any sport they desire. Boy's and Girl's sports will both be included into the website, which really leaves it open to Boys and Girls alike because the site will not be biased to any sport. Our next intended group of Customers would be Adult Men and Women (20 and up). This would be a place for them to check out their favorite Chicago college basketball team or check the schedule of their children's high school football team.
I am hesitant to say this website only targets local people in Chicago, simply because there are people that love sports that do not live in Chicago. A man in florida could easily use the site to see how the Northwestern Wildcat's football team is doing. So this site is targeted towards people that like ANY sports team in Chicago, rather than just the people of Chicago.
How will we attract different types of customers?
This is unique online experience. We aren't trying to sell anything to the visitors to our site, we are simply providing a service. This site could be used for both a utilitarian and hedonic online experience. An example of a utilitarian experience would be someone that simply wants to come to the site to see what time the Bears play. They just want to complete the task of checking the Bears schedule. They are only interested in coming to the site, finding the Bears game time and then they will leave. However, an example of the Hedonic experience would be someone that uses the site more for entertainment. This could be someone who is bored online, has nothing to do the next day, and wants to see which high school teams have games tomorrow. So they come to the site and browse around, clicking from team to team aimlessly, until they see something that catches their eye. So this user had a Hedonic experience because they used the site more for fun or just to simply pass some time.
How will our site implement the E-Commerce value chain?
Attract
The website will attract sports fans around Chicago by providing the latest information about the selected sports in our site. The users will not need to visit many websites to get their information. We will try our best to make the website user friendly and easy to navigate. Simplicity is one of the useful methods that will attract our costumers.
Interact
The implementation of the e-commerce value chain in our website will not require as much tools needed to make a web store. We will be more focused on providing the latest information about the sports. Advertisement tools could use the user profile to know what type of ads the user might be interested in.
Act
The way the team should act to make the website as a good site is by updating the information of the website frequently. Testing the website and making sure everything works well. Selling physical products will not be part of our services; there is no need to have a customer service support. Feedback from our users could be very helpful.
React
To maintain our service and support we should spend time on the usability testing of the website. Making sure to make the changes we need before uploading the final site. Feedback from the visitors could be very helpful. As a sports site focusing on the Chicago area there is no need to make a multi-language site.
Revenue model
The project website provide visitors sports news services without getting any product revenue, and it is going to attract advertising company as an advertising-supported revenue model. Food and drink can be the necessary for watching sports games, and it also means sports bar and restaurant will be other entries. Entertainment equipment and auto vehicle can attract the people as well. Health and sports equipment and accessory are also what sports hobbyists concern about. We can separate different age category advertisement in different level sports page. The advertisement on the page will be the main part of revenue resource to support the website.
Technical and design overview
For design purposes I decided to use Visual basic as the programing language. We will use asp.net to build the user interface and MS access to capture all call made from the web site. We also decided to use a the forum module to hold open discussions.
Contribution of members
Chen, Pou-Chang | Category of E-Commerce,Revenue Model |
Hines, Melvin | Project Overview,Value proposition,Technical and Design Implementing the e-commerce value chain |
Mulholland, Zach | Intended Customers Section, Attracting Customers section |
Sendi, Abdeen Muneer | Implementing the e-commerce value chain |
Yuan, Qiong | Website, final editing |