The Client
The Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo (ADSFR) is a big event here on the Gulf Coast every year, well regarded as the biggest fishing tournament in the entire world, where thousands come to compete in fishing for the finest specimens that the Gulf has to offer. In fact, they currently hold the Guinness Record for Biggest Annual Fishing Rodeo. We were honored when we were approached by the runners of the project, the Mobile Jaycees, in 2018 to build a brand new website for the event. Their site at the time was out of date; not responsive and generally lacked the creative feeling that they wanted to represent them. They wanted a website that worked, one that looked sleek and modern and included some much-needed features. So of course, we said OK!
The Website
With ADSFR having such a huge following, the website needed to be solid. We decided to use WordPress, for its reliability and extensible nature, which proved to be a good decision. ADSFR needed a series of features tailored specifically to the event, such as live weather updates that connect out to the buoys floating in the Gulf, as well as live leaderboards for the tournaments and live feeds. Apparel sales are also huge for the event, so the board wanted to support that through a new eCommerce section of the website, where users would be able to buy a variety of the events’ yearly items online during the event. These are all complicated features, and no existing set of code offered by WordPress was going to implement them.
So, we had to write our own. Our team of developers wrote a custom WordPress site, complete with PHP-powered interfaces completely unique to the site, that reliably pulled in all the necessary information. We lovingly crafted 32 individual pages, each one including all necessary marketing tags like Google Analytics and search console. The eCommerce portion was specifically built out to sell 13 different products to fans of the event in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
By the end, the ADSFR website was functional, reliable and up-to-date.
The Results
Their website was a big hit. The update greatly impacted the participants’ and spectators’ experience by allowing them an easy-to-use space to get all the information they needed online. In July alone, the site amassed 50,607 sessions, a major increase.
As far as merch, with the help of our developers and advertising team, we were able to bring in tons of web traffic and sales for as little as $0.93 for advertising per customer purchase, an astoundingly good value that made them very satisfied with their ROI. Within just days of the site being online, over 600 merch orders were already placed. This site was a huge victory for our client and for us, and we can’t wait for the next annual event to see it help them again.
