After an 11-year absence, pro football returned to Baltimore in 1996. The Ravens, a team that formerly played in Cleveland, moved into Baltimore Memorial Stadium and began play in the 1996 season. "This is a new beginning and a new era for us," Ravens owner Art Modell told fans at the team's naming ceremony. (The name Ravens was inspired by the poetry of former Baltimore resident Edgar Allan Poe.)
Although the team does indeed bring "a new era" of pro football to Baltimore, the Ravens could avoid many of the "growing pains" a new team typically endures. After all, they're not really a new team. Many of the team's veterans played together in Cleveland.
Also returning to Baltimore in 1996 is the Ravens' coach Ted Marchibroda, who led the Baltimore Colts from 1975 to 1979. In his first year with the Colts, Marchibroda took a club that had posted a 2-12 mark in 1974 and engineered a 10-4 record in 1975. At that time, it was the greatest one season turnaround in NF. It also marked the first time in league history that a team went from last to first in one season.
The Ravens wasted no time earning their first victory in franchise history. In their inaugural regular season game, the Ravens defeated the Oakland Raiders, 19-14, on September 1, 1996. A Memorial Stadium record crowd of 64,124 witnessed the historic moment.Under the direction of Ozzie Newsome, Vice President of Player Personnel, the team built a solid foundation on offense and defense through free agency and the draft. Then in 1999, the team hired long-time NFL assistant coach Brian Billick to handle the coaching reins. In just his second season, Billick, helped by a defense that allowed the fewest amount of points during a season in NFL history, guided the Ravens to a thrilling 34-7 victory in Super Bowl XXXV.
The Brief:Baltimore Ravens is a great NFL team that wanted to reconstruct their online pretense to be dynamic, cool and easy manageable. This is very height trafficked online property that visited mostly by team fans. The main goal was to provide fans with lightweight, easy to navigate website that will allow them to get up to minute fresh information about their team.
My Solution:I am extremely proud to be one of key players in this project. This website was built in tightest time line I have ever worked and it was reality test for all my web front and back end abilities that was after all rewarded as "Standard of Excellence" by webaward.org.
The Homepage -
Homepage is the most visited page on Ravens website. This page was designed specially to allow site visitor get as much information as possible and provide him with ability to go directly to any page on the website.
It has Pool, Email subscription and Weather feed that provided by Accuweather.com as XML file, that I got from their server into local TEMP directory every 1 hour and parsed to front end with PHP using data from the file and custom designed icons.
To get all resent news to homepage I used DHTML scrollable layer that gets news updates from CMS into HTML page.
Website -
Flash navigation on entire website uses external PHP file that has all relevant links inside so webmaster don't need to modify flash files each time link changes. Also it provides with future ability to manage flash navigation links thru CMS.
The whole internal part of the website uses one template. It means that if in future Ravens will decide to completely redesign whole website all they need to do is change one template file also it adds to site speed because once global images are loaded they are cached and accessed much faster from users hard drive.
Each page on the website accessed by his Section and Subsection names that provides easy to understand names while monitoring traffic of website using implemented WebTrends Live service.
90% of website information stored and can be updated from custom built CMS.
All user subscriptions for Newsletter or as members of website are ported into Ravens CRM System.
Technical Info:- Website: Apache on UNIX Server.
- Authentication: PHP, MySQL
- Front end: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, Flash and PHP.
- Back End: PHP, MySQL.
- Graphics and animations created and edited in Photoshop and ImageReady.
- QA: Explorer and Netscape 5+
