The leading web destination dedicated to the sport of football. Working at Goal.com was definitely an amazing experience. Days were long and the nights were even longer for a while since we had to routinely touch base with remote operations throughout the world and through several timezones.
Meetings with our dutch editor's team were at 11PM and the Japanese operations call was at 5AM. It was certainly a lot of hard work but it was also great seeing how things finally came together to produce and maintain a website that was published in over 17 languages across 200 countries!
When I started with Goal.com there were several issues we had to address for it's 2008 redesign. A lot of the content, stats, scores and transfers, was published live as it happened on the pitch. Player profiles, team pages and more all handled complex data and they all had to be presented in a way that was easy to consume and digest while making our audience come back for more.
My responsibilities leading Goal.com’s design team consisted of a lot one on one with each of our content producer's country representative to list out needs, goals and obstacles to overcome. Our audience in the west had more traditional issues to contend with like improving CTR and decreasing bounce rates from our overly complex stat pages, while in Japan we had to extend our brand's color scheme in order to include a more culturally appropriate color scheme with dark accents while still maintaining brand. For our audience in the UAE of course we had to literally flip our templates and go RLT. Designing for several languages most of which I could not speak or read certainly had it's share of new challenges but it was all worthwhile when we launched and successfully brought up readership and sponsorship across the board allowing us to go in even newer directions for the company.
