NZ Sevens

The NZ Sevens is the fourth stop on the HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series circuit and is famous in New Zealand as the nation’s biggest dress up party! Held in Wellington for the past 18 years, the tournament was looking to freshen things up after a recent decline in attendance numbers. With a new venue and a new look, it was time for a new website.

View the website

‘Aint no party like a Sevens party

We were thrilled to be asked by New Zealand Rugby to help with the revival of this iconic sporting event. After the initial planning session, we began by developing wireframes and working these through with the client in InVision to make sure we captured all the required functionality – such as the new self-select ticketing feature.

#nzsevens

Being a major social event we already had the perfect platform to socialise and energise the event – our very own Strea.ma! Shameless plug ahead, Strea.ma is used for generating real-time social media feeds for both websites as well as at the event itself. We are very proud to be a sponsor of the HSBC NZ Sevens.

A fun weekend out, the website needed to reflect the excitement and personality of the tournament itself.

Go bold or go home

We were quite excited by the colour palette provided by the client and we wanted to maximise the use of the colour – so we went bold! We can safely say with hand on heart that we haven’t designed such a colourful site before. It made us smile every time we looked at it, so it certainly won’t be the last.

For the key call to actions, we used a floating button behaviour, lifting the button from its neighbouring content. This helped to draw the eye, with such a vibrant and impactful site. Rounded corners completed the warm and happy look the client was after.

Proxima Nova was chosen as the web font for the NZ sevens site. Because the site already had a lot of personality we wanted to use a font that wasn’t over-designed and wouldn’t steal some of the thunder. It is a simple and friendly font that offers a lot of flexibility – allowing the content to speak for itself. It’s clean and minimal look makes it perfect for screen reading – no wonder it’s one of the most popular web fonts used today.

Development

Making sure the site was quick to load became our solid foundation to work from, but it also meant we had to be selective with our content.

Live scoring and self-select ticketing functionality was just some of the custom functionality that we developed for the site. The former is fairly self-explanatory but the idea with the self-select ticketing system was to make it easier for users to find a seat based on their sevens style – be it party animals, or laid back and relaxed.

The entire website is built using WordPress – a CMS system that offers plenty of features and support and importantly is easy to use. This was especially key for our client who needs to quickly adjust content on a high traffic platform.

To complete the package, we also designed and developed their email templates for ongoing marketing.

Kicking for goal

In its hay-day, 30-odd thousand tickets would sell out within minutes, so we had to make sure that the site was robust and the servers were prepared to handle such traffic. We were delighted to get this feedback from the client two weeks after launch “Had a rip-roaring start with over half the stadium all sold now which is great!”