Project Details

Redesign of the collaborative portal 2.0 / social network, developed for the professional and amateur soccer segment, with the goal of facilitating relations between managers, clubs, coaches, agents and athletes. 

As a start up project of our own initiative, we were directly responsible for all parts and stages of development. Including content creation in both languages.

This is the redesign of a portal that was created in 2007. Initially, it had another name - Soccer e-agent. It was aimed at the international audience. Soon it became popular in the Brazilian market. The name and address have been modified to make it easier for understanding - Players' Portal. In the reformulation, we presented an international version, together with a name change so that it has a clear connection with the Portuguese version - Soccer Player´s Portal.

The core of the operation, which already existed in the previous version, is to offer a platform for creating accounts for athletes and agents. In the case of agents, they can include their portfolio of players available for negotiation, according to their technical characteristics, such as position (striker, midfield, left midfielder, among others), age, height, weight, club history, along with YouTube videos - complete or compact games of the highlights, and photos. In the case of the Player Account, it has the same features, however, management and administration only of its own profile.

The appeal of the portal’s first version was the possibility to upload complete videos to the profile. At that time, YouTube was starting to emerge, but it had major limitations. The videos were low quality and allowed only up to 5 minutes of recording.

Agents were used to mailing athletes' DVDs to the professionals with whom they were negotiating. They had to bear the costs of copying DVDs, sending them by post and also waiting a while for the material to reach the recipient.

The portal's objective was precisely to create a more agile and low-cost solution to this demand. The platform has an extremely useful feature - sending the athlete's complete profile by email to any recipient. Thus, in addition to having considerably lowered the cost for agents to send their players, we also managed to do it in a practical way and with a pre-formatted professional presentation, which helps to value the image of the negotiating athlete.

Another important aspect is the athlete’s listing and advance search in the portal. Due to the need to register complete details of the athletes, of course, it could be organized in a way to smooth the search for professionals with specific details, such as: male athlete, with birth date between 2002 and 2005, who plays in the positions of midfield, right midfield, right back.

With all these resources and optimization, we were able to stipulate an average value for the subscription of the account of $ 50.00 / month, compared to the $ 30.00 spent, on average, for copying and sending each DVD for each prospect. The digital product had good feedback and even appeared in some of the major local newspapers such as the Globo, among others. To see the articles, just visit the website and access the Clippings area.

With the sale of YouTube to Google, the main functionality for displaying high-quality videos was losing its attractiveness due to the price charge, which was proportional to the amount of videos made available. This situation resulted in the need for the portal to undergo its first graphic and structural redesign, in 2010. The subscription ceased to exist, together with the upload of digital media, and the inclusion of videos started to be done by YouTube. In addition, the monetization part became backed by AdSense and direct ads.

For some years, the Portal was left to operate autonomously, as it contained a registration cycle that allowed it to function without monitoring. Surprisingly, over the period of more than 8 years without any update, the portal continued to receive new users. These more than 1400 users used the dashboard to display their information and send their profiles.

Due to the portal’s popularity, in 2019 we decided to do a complete redesign and upgrade of the platform. Not only to add modern features that have been popularized in the technology industry in recent years, but also to serve as an example project on several levels.

The redesign consisted of:
- Graphic interface redesign;
- Mobile version development;
- Adaptation to a new programming language;
- Adaptation to a new database;
- Inclusion of new account type - Club Account;
- New paid accounts with higher resource usage limits;
- Features to request and manage friendship;
- Chat between users, similar to Facebook;
- Feature to assign as favorite;
- “Like” feature;
- Platform version in additional language version;
- Send profile by email with languages option;
- Market place, managed by users, to include products or services they offer;
- Display try out dates on the Club Accounts;
- In addition to other features that will be added gradually.

After adding these new features, the portal started to have resources similar to social networks. The goal is to continue to develop more interactive features to increase engagement between users.

The portal management system has several features. From content management in both languages, inclusion of news, clipping, sending mass communication by e-mail, to managing users, along with orders placed by new accounts.

http://www.portaldosjogadores.com.br

2019