“ We love that we are able to have a high concept site for a very powerful consumer brand that is manageable via a CMS. The rich media experience does not sacrifice SEO or accessibility since all content is reachable by distinct unique URLs, fully crawlable and readable by screen readers and robots. „

- Benjamin Bykowski, Optiem

Challenge

The purpose of LeBronJames.com is to extend LeBron James' personal brand and grow the relationship between LeBron and his fans by providing exclusive content of his life both on and off the court.

Goals for the site included:

• Create a unique, immersive experience for the end user
• Make content entry and administration easy and effective
• Develop a platform for collective voice across all of LeBron's marketing team at LRMR
• Support as wide a range of platforms as possible
• Build an architecture that would grow with LeBron's career

Solution

Optiem, a Sitecore partner, was selected to build the LeBron James site. According to Benjamin Bykowski, Optiem, “We knew that we had to create a very flexible architecture for this high concept site. We chose Sitecore because no other CMS would have provided the flexibility we needed. Also, with LeBron's new home in Miami, we had future plans to provide a Spanish version of the site and no other CMS we have worked with supports multilingual content as well as Sitecore.”

Optiem extended the solution in several ways, including developing a tool that eases the import and export of content to a manageable Excel format that can be used by translation companies.

Says Bykowski, “We love that we are able to have a high concept site for a very powerful consumer brand that is manageable via a CMS. The rich media experience does not sacrifice SEO or accessibility since all content is reachable by distinct unique URLs, fully crawlable and readable by screen readers and robots.”

Result

Since the site was launched there has been a huge spike in traffic, and visitation by HTML5 browsers and mobile devices are well above the global statistical average.

Says Bykowski, “Given the nature of this client, the design and the ultimate goals of the site, there is little doubt that much of what we accomplished would not have been possible, given the time frame, on many other CMS systems including many of Sitecore's industry peers.”