Project managing a web portal for Euro 2012

There are just two days to the final Euro 2012 match between Italy and Spain, after the beautiful victory Italy claimed against Germany yesterday. As a person who took part in the Euro 2012 online presence for the Bulgarian market, I am going to describe a very nice project I managed and completed about two months ago. It was a micro website for Euro 2012, developed for the largest Bulgarian football portal – gol.bg (part of IBG group). The website is still there – so feel free to visit it at: www.gol.bg/euro2012/

Project scope

The project scope was to create an Euro 2012 micro website in Gol.bg
The micro website should have had the following sections:
- Main page with recent news, articles, games forecasts, analysis, ads, etc…
- Special sections with forecast, analysis and lifestyle news
- Section about the groups and the teams
- Section about all Euro championships - the history
- Section about the cities and the stadiums
- Section containing calendar of the matches
- Gallery section

My team consisted of internal UX gurus and designers, internal media team and external web development company. I was responsible to project manage the execution and the delivery of the project. We started doing the mock-up and the design of the pages. I provided design specifications – regarding the sections we needed and the the type of content the designers needed to put in every section. Our internal designers did a great job of selecting the most relevant color scheme and to provide great maps, pictures and photos of the stadiums, national teams, national flags, various logos, etc… After that - the design was approved by the Ops director and the company management.

It was time for me to move the project, along with the development specifications to the external web development team. They needed to do the front end coding and the development of the micro web site. They did a great job of doing the frontend coding in less than a week and to deliver the first beta site in about two weeks. I am not going to bore you with my checklist and project plan, but just want to mention that everything went really smoothly and according to my plan. After the beta site was completed I and Gol.bg media team inspected it and returned several revisions. After they were implemented it took some time before the media team was able to fill all the needed content. When this was done – I presented the project to our managers to get the final approval. And in the second week of May 2012 – our Euro 2012 micro website went live. More than 50 000 unique users are visiting it every day and the feedback we receive is really great.