Selected Case Studies
Visit: U-Sports.com
U-Sports: College Fantasy Football Application
The Objective:
U-Sports wanted an online application for users to manage college football fantasy leagues. The project had three major components:
  • A public web site where users could learn about the U-Sports service, sign-up, pay, and manage their fantasy team throughout the season.
  • A secure, private web site for U-Sports administrators to provide customer service, update content, and manage the application.
  • Automated processes for importing football statistics, player news, and schedules.
  • Online player draft application with timed picks and chat.
With a small staff, it was critical to U-Sports that the application was built as automated as possible in order to ensure that most of the staff’s time could be used for customer service, marketing, and determining new enhancements.

Project Components:
  • Full-service, fantasy team management application
  • Integrated e-commerce / credit card processing
  • Real-time player stats reporting and score calculations
  • Integrated news, television schedules, and player analysis
  • Customizable features for individual teams and leagues
  • Online marketing and e-mail campaigns
  • Co-branded interface options for U-Sports’ partners
  • Content management system
  • Search engine optimization
  • Administrator extranet
  • Prize tracking/distributions

Results:
Perimeter Consulting built the first version of U-Sports in 1999 and has worked on enhancing the application every year since, including several major redesigns. The last major redesign was implemented for the 2006 season which included redeveloping the entire application for Microsoft’s .NET Framework (v2.0).

The U-Sports application employed the following services offered by Perimeter Consulting:
  • Graphical design
  • Application development
  • Project management
  • Strategy / Consulting
  • Information architecture
  • Content strategy and copywriting
  • E-mail marketing
  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • QA Testing
The application has been very successful for U-Sports. Since inception, the number of customers has nearly doubled every year. During this growth, U-Sports has not had to grow the support staff while continuing to provide excellent customer service. This can be attributed in part to the automation and self-service built into the application, but also in part to an intuitive user interface that reduces the number of customer questions.

Technologies used:
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
  • SQL Server
  • C#
  • Microsoft Ajax (Atlas)
  • ASP.NET
  • VB/VB.NET
  • XML
  • Web Services
  • U-Sports is hosted on a Windows 2003-based server farm in Perimeter Consulting’s data center.