Website solutions company Realnet Ltd recently had one of its client’s, Kick Off, scoop a prestigious global award for digital innovation and excellence.
Kick Off is South Africa’s largest football news publisher, with both print and online publications covering the local South African league, as well as international news and features.
The South Africans first partnered with Realnet in early 2012 to revamp their digital platforms. At the time, their website – although a market leader in terms of traffic – was outdated and difficult for staff to manage on a daily basis.
Kick Off realised the need for a fresh new digital platform, as well as the need to expand their offering to help drive the online business forward as the print market began to decline.
With the significant increase in mobile news consumption in the country and across the continent, they also needed a data-light mobile version that satisfied this new market whilst taking into account data costs and availability.
After online consultancy meetings and a trip to Cambridge, Kick Off asked Realnet to custom build a new website (kickoff.com) and mobile site, and also incorporate a fully integrated rewards programme and user-generated blog platform to encourage user loyalty.
The new Kick Off platforms, which went live in May 2012, showed immediate growth and month-on-month growth after the first-year improvement in excess of 400 percent. It receives nearly 800,000 visitors each month, with more than 13.8 million pages of content consumed.