Creating a customer-centric, needs-based website for Lord’s: enabling the MCC and Lord’s to communicate directly with members and cricket fans.
Introducing Lord’s
Lord's is often referred to as the 'Home of Cricket' and the sport's spiritual headquarters; hosting international matches, county cricket and Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) games. Owned by the MCC, Lord’s has a long and rich history and is perhaps one of the most important places in world cricket. We first started working with Lord’s in 1998 and launched their most recent site redesign in 2007.
The challenge
The Lord’s website is home to a vast amount of information; from the history of the ground to ticketing information, merchandising, fixtures and MCC games. This information needed to be intuitively organised and displayed to help users achieve their on-site goals and Lord’s objectives. Lord’s diverse audience base included England cricket fans, MCC members, International cricket fans, tourists, cricket enthusiasts, local cricket clubs and players.
What we did
We began the Lord’s redesign process by identifying the macro objectives for the new site with key stakeholders (e.g. selling tickets, generating hospitality bookings, promoting tours, selling debentures, managing MCC matches). Simultaneously, we profiled Lord’s key audience groups to ensure that the site was structured around their needs too; with clear cricketing news, fixtures, tickets and travel information. We built the site to be search engine friendly, with flattened URLs, editable META data and content optimisation to increase the findability of articles. OTHERobjects CMS is used to run the entirety of Lord’s site, including the ‘Fixture Manager’ extranet, which enables the MCC to organise its players and schedule matches.
The results
Lord’s new website is extremely search engine friendly and highly-visible, with 65 per cent of visitors coming from organic search results in the past year. Top content areas, identified via Google Analytics, correlate with the macro objectives set at the beginning of the project, with news being the most popular, followed by ticket availability, fixture information, Lord’s tours and find us.