Following the success of Opta being crowned the Official Data Partners for The Barclays Premier League and The SkyBet Football League (SkyBet Championship, SkyBet League 1, SkyBet League 2), Opta were asked take a new approach to the programme pages that are currently supplied to every team who play in these leagues, as well as all their cup competitions (The FA Cup and The Capital One Cup).
The first issue we had to overcome was how to tailor these programme pages for each club, as there were multiple sizes and different orientations requested by each. The second issue to address was how to adapt the featured content for each league or competition as each would use varying types of data, some of which would not be applicable to another.
To overcome these problems, we produced the templates to be constructed from smaller modules of data. These modules could then be easily moved or exchanged for something more significant depending on the nature of the fixture. This also allowed us to cater for nearly any layout size we were faced with.
The templates created had to be designed to be automatically populated at the production stage so we had to allow for varying amounts of content.
As a backbone to the programme pages we used a fixture specific head-to-head page as well as the dedicated competition overview page.
As the 2013/14 football season kicked off over 50 UK football clubs are publishing these designs in their programme on a weekly basis.