TheBeerBowl.com - Good Beer Meets Good Design
The Beer Bowl is an event that celebrates its 8th anniversary in January 2011. Started as a homegrown group taste-testing beers during Super Bowl halftimes, it’s grown into a yearly event with an entire season of beer tasting to determine what beers are worthy enough to participate in a 30 beer, head-to-head blind taste test.
When I started working with Bob Ashdown, creator of Beer Bowl, he was just beginning to grow from a small, yearly event into an entire season set up similar to fantasy football. Beer Bowl was an exciting project for me – I’ve spent the last few years not just helping grow their web presence, but as an avid participant.
The original version of thebeerbowl.com was built on the Joomla! 1.0 platform and was running the template that was included by default with that install. Bob, or ‘The Commish,’ as he’s known to Beer Bowl judges, had some distinct ideas about what needed to be done to solidify its place on the web. “The Beer Bowl was growing, and needed to modernize and update the image…we needed something which was clean and distinct. Further, we desired a real-time database backend, with data reflection for beer ratings and standings. This was something we previously were doing by hand and uploading - spending hours on this.”
We broke the project into two phases – site redesign and reorganization, and implementation of real-time ratings. In addition to creating a Joomla! template that reflected the character of the organization, and revising the site architecture, Beer Bowl needed a brand new logo as well. The organization of the site split neatly into two categories – news, standings, and promotions available to all site visitors, and specific action items for authenticated users.
For the second phase, implementing a real-time method of tracking ratings and statistics, the Fabrik plugin for Joomla! was installed as a basis. It allows for custom table creation using the Joomla! administrative interface with control over what users can input data into those tables. With the creation of the necessary tables and forms, several simple modules were written (using PHP and MySQL) to display specific data sets to users. The result was access to directly rate over 1600+ beers logged in the database, and see how those ratings reflected in overall standings.
These changes had a drastic effect on the way Beer Bowl judges interacted with the website. During the “regular season” (the period from July to December when judges can submit ratings on different beers), thebeerbowl.com registered an average of 500 visits a month, with users visiting an average of nearly 9 pages per visit – contributing to the over 10,000 ratings collected during the season! The effect on the user base was noticeable, as Bob was able to clearly tell. “Live standings drew more return traffic to the site. With a clean design on the homepage, user navigation and experience was tremendously improved.”
What’s next for Beer Bowl on the web? Bob has plans to come: “In the future, we'd like to further encourage a "social network" type of environment with use of things such as a forum offering users the ability to interact with each other and post messages. On another front, we'd like to get a mobile site up, so that users can quickly and easily view their existing ratings, and enter new ones from mobile browsers.”
