By Austin Lemme
Executive Creative Director, Co-Founder

The annual Tostitos Fiesta Bowl in Glendale, Ariz., part of the Bowl Championship Series, has been bringing college football fans to the Valley of the Sun for more than 40 years. In addition to the big game, the Fiesta Bowl also sponsors a multitude of statewide community events, ranging from youth football clinics to the Fiesta Bowl Block Party on New Year’s Eve. This year, ZOG Media was tasked with redesigning the Fiesta Bowl’s website, and we’re proud of the eye-catching, user-friendly new design.

Fiesta Bowl approached us with a few key objectives: share their 41-year heritage with the fans, improve the website’s structure and usability and create a more resourceful and interactive experience for their fans, volunteers, event participants and anyone new to Fiesta Bowl. We tackled these objectives in a number of different ways.

2012 marks the 41st anniversary of the Fiesta Bowl, and they wanted to showcase their heritage of “Serving the community since 1971.” When we first met with Fiesta Bowl, their website lacked the imagery and excitement that made their Bowl games, events and brand popular.

I spent a lot of time with their creative and marketing team going over ideas and looking at some “vintage” artwork they had been playing with for some print campaigns to support the upcoming Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. We decided to carry out the vintage look onto the web and introduce modern visuals with a vintage style to bring fans back to Fiesta Bowl’s roots when they began in the early 70′s.

Besides updating stylistic elements of the site, it was very important for them to make their website a more interactive resource that fans, volunteers and event participants could continually visit year round–not just during the college Bowl season.

The first step in this was to organize their content and resources, so we completely restructured their site architecture and navigation to make all of their content and resources easier to locate and more readily accessible. We called out a lot of Fiesta Bowl’s great features that their old site didn’t showcase as much as they should have been. We brought forward the Fiesta Bowl Charities and Volunteers sections and will continue to update and grow these areas. Through design, architecture, search engine optimization and social elements, we wanted to show the world that Fiesta Bowl is more than just football–it contributes to many different causes through charities, athletic and academic events and more.

To do that, organization was key. Fiesta Bowl has a lot of great content, but it was spread out all over the web (i.e. YouTube, many Facebook pages, Twitter, etc.) Not only did we help them organize their content in the social space, we also made sure to focus our keyword research heavily on their target audience and create easy ways for that audience to share this content in the social space. We organized and integrated fresh content into the site and introduced more photos and albums, videos and social tools to generate more interactivity. ZOG Media’s social team is continually working on many different social campaigns, so it was important for us to showcase and promote these campaigns throughout the site with visuals, interactive calls-to-action and target pages.

The most important components of any process are strategic planning and communication. We were very fortunate to work closely with the Fiesta Bowl team throughout the entire website design and development process. They have a very positive group and stayed closely engaged and open to our ideas, which made everything easy to produce when we transitioned from design to development.

ZOG Media has the experience to do more than create a website. Working with some of the biggest brands in the world has given us the privilege of learning the important elements of what makes a great online campaign successful. Our design, social media, search engine optimization and technology services, along with our ability to build growing relationships with clients, has proven to be the core of our success.