Play Like a Champion Today Known as the "Motto that Motivates", "Play Like a Champion Today" is one of the most widely recognized college sports slogans around.  It's biggest claim to fame is the sign hanging in the tunnel at the University of Notre Dame football stadium.  In the early 90s, the original painter of the sign, her husband, and a business partner started PLACT, Inc to market and sell merchandise bearing the motto that motivates. Utilizing an early e-commerce solution, PLACT, Inc has been selling merchandise online for over 10 years.

Online Like a Champion

The Situation

While PLACT had been online for over a decade, the company had been using a very early hosted e-commerce solution.  While the services would have been considered ahead of the game in the mid 90s, they are greatly out of date and offer little in the area of updates and customizations to its clients.  PLACT was limited to creating a one page, table-based online store with no branding possibilities.  PLACT was not able to provide customized options, nor create a store that reflected the quality and tradition of the product they were selling.  At the same time, due to the fragile system and lack of seo, when searching for the terms "play like a champion today" in Google, the PLACT website and store displayed the 270th page of Google results (placing it between the 2701st and 2710th result).

The Opportunity

Upon meeting with PLACT in mid 2009, we immediately knew that there was an opporunity to improve upon what the company had in place and create a design that would reflect the tradition and culture of the product being sold.  

Creative Underground set out with the following goals:

• Create a design that would reflect the tradition and history behind the slogan "Play Like A Champion Today"
• Build an online store that supported PLACT's current needs to easily update product and pricing infomration, allow for affiliate tracking, promotional codes, integrated payment system, integrated shipping, blogging, and more.
• Improve the the company's search engine ranking from the 270th page
• Meet a tight budget and timeline

The Project

Creative Underground first provided PLACT with 3 different design concepts for their new online store.

During this process, we also conducted research on the best shopping solution to use (custom developed, hosted, or customized open source system).  We took a look at several solutions including Volusion, BigCommerce, 3D Cart, X-Cart, Pinnacle Cart, Interspire, ASPdotnetstorefront, NopCommerce, Zen Cart, Network Solutions, and more.

Based on requested features, customization flexibility, and budgeting criteria, a proposal to use and customize an existing open source solution based on NopCommerce was delivered along with the designs.

A 3-phase project was proposed:

• Phase 1: Design Selection
• Phase 2: Interim Working Proof of Concept (POC)
• Phase 3: Deployment of Final Custom Solution Based on NopCommerce

After the final design was selected, Creative Underground began working on a POC based on ASP.net and SQL Server.

During the development of the POC, PLACT ran into a critical issue with the company providing their online shopping cart and payment system.  After an emergency phone call, it was decided to make the POC live to prevent PLACT from losing any additional business due to issues with their previous host. 

Creative Underground pre-populated the product data, customized a simple shopping cart and integrated a payment solution utilizing PayPal.  PLACT was up and running again with their new design and a more robust (but not final) solution within 24 hours of the initial issue.

Results

Phase 3 of the project is still currently underway.  Creative Underground has trained the staff at PLACT on how to use the new system.  The new store is built and in place and PLACT is currently updating the product offerings, descriptions, and more.  Once PLACT is finished with the administrative pieces, the final shopping cart solution, along with enhanced SEO will go live.

To date, the project has been delivered on schedule and on budget. 

Simply making the POC live, with its basic SEO in place, moved PLACT from the 270th page when searching for "play like a champion today" to 2nd page in Google search results.  Current competition for the first page of results includes the University of Notre Dame, CSTV, some of PLACT's affiliates/vendors, and a charity that bears the PLACT name by permission.  Creative Underground continues to work with PLACT to improve SEO and also develop a social media strategy using networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Additional Work

Along with finalizing Phase 3 of the online store, Creative Underground has also provided/continues to provide the following services to PLACT:

• Product Photo Editing
• Business Card Design and Printing
• Promotional Card Design and Printing
• SEO and Social Media Recommendations