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Gatorade: Fueling Sports Excellence

8/2/2024 3:46:26 PM Red Door Interactive http://www.reddoor.biz Red Door Interactive

GATORADE

The Gatorade Player of the Year (POY) Award recognizes the nation’s most outstanding high school students for their athletic excellence, academic achievement, and exemplary character. Professional athletes like Payton Manning, Alyson Felix, and Lebron James have all received this prestigious award. 

Services Provided

The Challenge

To further the mission of their Player of the Year program, Gatorade was looking to refresh the look and feel of the Player of the Year website to better reflect the history and esteem of the award, along with reiterating the brand’s commitment to the equity and future of sports. 

Our Approach

Red Door set out to create a brief to align with the client on expectations and goals before going to the drawing board and designing a modern, sleek new website to create a more enjoyable experience for people visiting it. 

GOALS

  1. Create a cohesive visual website experience that eliminated confusion and drove equity in the Gatorade Player of the Year (POY) program among competitive teen athletes.
  2. Present the Gatorade POY award as an exceptional form of recognition, ensuring that winners are excited to share their achievements and inspiring all high school competitive athletes to aspire to win it.
  3. Demonstrate Gatorade’s commitment to the past, present, and future of sports, underscoring its longstanding dedication to supporting athletes at all levels.

Put Us In, Coach

Our team knew we needed to keep the main function of the website as recognizing and celebrating the state and national winners of each sport, but we also wanted to optimize the other key functions, which included submitting athlete nominations and linking out to a portal for winners to submit their grants. With our shared goals in mind, the Red Door team set out to reskin the current Player of the Year website to better align with Gatorade’s new branding standards. In the end, we would deliver them a more engaging, visually appealing, simpler online experience for their website viewers.

content

We conducted a full content audit, reviewing the current website content to identify any gaps or opportunities for design improvement. Red Door analyzed the data strategically and presented the findings to our teammates at Gatorade. The insights from this audit contributed to the Website Creative Brief we went on to design.

technical SEO

If you update your website and no one sees it, did you actually update it? Our technical SEO team wanted to ensure that this didn't happen. This team conducted a Technical SEO Audit, checking the POY website against the current SEO best practices. After collecting a large amount of data and analyzing their findings, we shared these results with the client.

THE RESULTS

Following these audits, Red Door developed a Website Creative Brief to ensure our team was aligned with our client. Based on this alignment and the approved wireframes, we established a set of website Brand Guidelines. Our team created design compositions for twelve website pages, three of which included wireframe redesigns to improve user experience and ease on the site. All redesigned pages incorporated the “cool” modern feel of the award today, while still elevating the history and prestige of yesterday.