The previous New Orleans Saints’ web site was developed and hosted by a regional telecommunications firm. Their design averaged 74,000 hits on a monthly basis. To the Saints’ misfortune, that firm failed and Highwire was brought in three weeks before the Saints’ site shut down. In those few days, Highwire was able to configure a new hosting solution and transferred the old site to our new servers without an interruption in service.

The Saints’ aim was to increase traffic and cultivate fan loyalty with the ultimate goal of increasing ticket and merchandise sales and generating new sources of advertising and sponsorship revenues. They also required the site to serve as the primary distribution source of in-season information to the local and national media and to serve as an archive for old game footage, photos and statistics for the media and fans. Finally, the site had to be easy operate so the Saints’ staff could update the site and post new stories, photos and information daily to the site's database though they had limited programming skills.

Hence, our task was to create a larger, more complex site, that their staff could operate and update, yet was easier to navigate and more user friendly at the same time. Achieving these competing aims was a difficult task.

Highwire choose to create a new database driven web site utilizing the Linux platform for greater stability, less downtime and lower maintenance costs. This would allow Saints personnel to update the individual entries in the database and easily post new stories and photos to the site. We also introduced new fan-friendly features like message boards and chat rooms for them to voice their opinions of the team. Photos of the Saints’ training facility- including the training room, locker room and weight room- were included. Highwire designed "wallpaper" that fans could download for their monitors. Finally, we added a feature to the web site where potential ticket purchasers could see the 'view' from various seating sections.

The results were quite dramatic. Within the first month, traffic to the new Highwire developed Saints web site increased more than 15-fold to over 2.5 million page views. The number of individual users (IP addresses) also increased to over 250,000 in the first month of service and at one point nearly crept into the top 30% of NFL team sites for traffic. Saints personnel posted virtually all internally generated content, significantly reducing the maintenance costs of the site while increasing the traffic with a constant stream of fresh info and material. Finally, what was a constant flow of printed and mailed press releases became a steady stream of emails and web site postings. The costs associated with printing and mailing updated press releases was completely eliminated and the number of media guides produced was reduced by 15%.

Revenues from advertising and sponsorships for the web site also increased dramatically, offsetting the design and operating costs of the site. Nearly 15,000 fans signed up for "Saints Now!", a weekly email update service offered on the site that included Saints news, stories and special ticket and merchandise promotions.

Finally, the Saints sold out every game of the 2001 season, perhaps with the assistance of neworleanssaints.com.

www.neworleanssaints.com