Wicked designed and developed a new website for professional poker player Justin Bonomo at JustinBonomo.com. Justin and his management team were looking to completely revamp their existing site in order to better reflect who Justin is as person and poker player. Everything from video blogs, interviews, press releases, blog posts, photos, podcasts, Twitter and even musical tastes needed to be incorporated into the build.
On top of that, we always keep an eye on making the content management as simple as possible so the client is not required to contact us to keep their site up to date. From posting photos and videos to blog posts, it needed to be done in a way that was not time-consuming and made maintaining the site easier instead of frustrating. To that end, we used WordPress as the CMS and managed to find simple, yet elegant, solutions for this multimedia website.
Here are some notes on key parts of the site and how we implemented some of the features you will see at JustinBonomo.com.
Through several meetings, mock-ups and wireframes, we arrived at a design that that Justin felt suited his personality, then went about adding in content that would give visitors a quick glimpse into his life and career. To accomplish this, we included several elements that would serve as a dashboard for his most recent news items including most recent tweet, video interview and blog posts. To give visitors a glimpse at Justin’s personality, we included the Last.fm widget, which is updated with tracks he listens to on iTunes. As a result, the home page was no longer static like before and is now updated dynamically as he goes about his life and job.
Poker media outlets generate an immense amount of content on a daily basis and as one of the top players on the poker circuit, Justin is often featured in various photos and videos on those sites. We wanted the gallery to be a home for as much of that content as possible, pulling in multimedia from all over the web.
The photo gallery is managed by the excellent NextGen Gallery plugin, which gave us a lot of options for hosting our own images (boosting traffic for image searches) and displaying them gracefully using javascript. The backend of the plugin is very user-friendly and makes it easy to add individual photos and organize them into albums and galleries. The smaller selection on the main gallery page was populated by calling in a single sidebar containing the NextGen widget set to display random photos from the gallery. The full Photo Gallery page displays the entirety of that gallery we created within the plugin.
For videos, we ran into the problem of having content from varied sources needing to be integrated into the page in a manner easy enough for the user to update and universal enough to handle embed codes from multiple sites. Because of this, we couldn’t use a plugin without getting too complex and possibly eliminating some sites with non-standard embed codes. So, we made each video a separate post and used custom fields within those posts that would be pulled into the WordPress loop and displayed within a shadowbox set at a standard size to accomodate the largest video size likely to be used. For the user, adding videos to the site is as easy as writing a new blog post and pasting the video embed code into a custom field, the rest is handled by the template we created for the page. The full Video Gallery page is just an extension of this with the query set to show all posts from the category.
With the amount of written content put out, not only by poker media, but by Justin himself, we wanted to create a page that could be a hub for all of his media content – a dashboard of all things Justin. Clockwise, the media page displays his most recent articles written for print publications, articles from publications written about him, the latest news (press releases) from his management team, most recent blog posts, radio shows and podcasts and a Twitter feed. Some link directly out to the sites where he was featured and some link through to internal pages. Either way, the process of adding content to this dashboard is as easy for the user as creating a new blog post, putting it in the right (and obviously named) category and filling in some information in the (once again, obviously named) custom fields of the post. All of the links, titles and everything else are handled by the template built for the page.
The most popular section of Justin’s old site was his blog, which featured poker strategy, tournament updates, personal updates and more. However, with no permalinks available for each post and no way for people to share the blog posts – without copying and pasting it somewhere else – his content was more or less stuck on his site. With this blog section (and thanks to WordPress, which makes this very easy) each post has its own link and one-click share tools, giving visitors the ability to tweet, Facebook, Digg, email or bookmark the posts instantly, spreading them across the social web and building Justin’s visibility as a brand while driving traffic and authority to his site.
Well, without getting too horribly technical, that’s about it. The site is up and already drawing in a good amount of traffic. Once the spiders realize that there is now lots more delicious content to devour, we’ll begin to see even more organic traffic heading in. The dynamic nature of the features we set up ensure that no visit is the same as long as the content is kept fresh, which has been made as easy as possible for the user. So, take a look at the site and let us know your thoughts in the comments below, reply to us on Twitter, or drop us a line on our Facebook page.
