Inovica were contacted by the St. Albans based company Sport One, who had seen the PortalRoom technology in action on another website. They thought that this technology could be appropriate to create a new sports portal, primarily aimed at grass-roots sport, and one of the deciding factors was the flexible licensing offered by the Inovica product suite.

The requirements for Inovica were to provide initial consultancy into what was possible using the PortalRoom technology, and to establish any bespoke programming requirements. In addition to this, the integration of third-party data feeds into the system were vitally important to the initial phase of the site.

Inovica firstly undertook a strategic analysis of the SportOne requirements, culminating in a development plan with milestones. An initial site, without any branding or design, was then created and placed onto a staging server so that the SportOne staff could become familiar with the workings of the system and input initial content. In parallel, the Inovica design team worked on logo design and the branding of the website to provide a distinctive style, complete with a website that could display a large amount of information.

The sophisticated PortalRoom system that Inovica developed has proved to be a very successful choice. The site was designed, developed and launched within a six week timeframe and SportOne were able to launch before their planned date. The site contains a complete directory, club listings, league system, discussion forums and events. From the administration it is possible to restrict access to any section so that only members can view the content, and the system has a full banner advertising system built-in.

Following its launch, SportOne.com received a large amount of media coverage and has proven to be a useful site for grass roots sports participants. The SportOne team have plans to update and enhance the site over the coming year.

Inovica enhanced the SportOne.com portal by adding a SiteBuilder system to the site.  This SiteBuilder enables any sports club to create their own website in minutes via the SportOne system. Using a template-based approach, any sports club can, with a few clicks of the mouse, create a useful site for their club, without requiring any technical knowledge. So far, in only a few days over thirty clubs have already created their own sites.