Those of you not familiar with the need to shorten URLs may appreciate the practicality of turning a 100-plus character URL into 22 characters. With the frequent use of micro-blogging, instant messaging and email, it is often more convenient to send a shorter URL. While some may say that it would be easier just to copy the entire address bar and send it over, we agree to a certain extent. We also know that there are situations, while communicating virtually, that have some space limitations to take into consideration. That is the first reason why we decided to look into the idea.

The second portion behind our justification was branding. With fairly little overhead and short amount of time, Creative Ops, was able to deploy a URL shortening tool that would compliment the All Arizona Baseball destination location. The domain would be easily recognizable, short and catchy, in the interest of trying to get it to spawn usage.

While traffic on the site is slowly beginning to increase, we have made arrangements to assist local sports website Fanster.com with their 2009 Spring Training coverage, which includes building out the Spring Training portion of their website. While this relationship will serve as an opportunity to increase local exposure in the Phoenix Metro area, we have also planned to partner up with one of the largest, most successful Metro Rail Blogs, Rail Life. Both organizations have been diligently shortening their URLs using the tool and for that we are both gracious and excited. Additional plans for the tool include integration with AZ Hardball.com‘s article pages for the delivery of links to friends.

Check it out today at http://strik.es

Throw Strikes with Shorter URLs

In an effort to build traffic for our recently launched baseball site, we recently launched a new online website to shorten URLs. Although, it may seem like everyone is making their own version of the handy technology, we have done a little branding to ours.

Those of you not familiar with the need to shorten URLs may appreciate the practicality of turning a 100-plus character URL into 22 characters. With the frequent use of micro-blogging, instant messaging and email, it is often more convenient to send a shorter URL. While some may say that it would be easier just to copy the entire address bar and send it over, we agree to a certain extent. We also know that there are situations, while communicating virtually, that have some space limitations to take into consideration. That is the first reason why we decided to look into the idea.

The second portion behind our justification was branding. With fairly little overhead and short amount of time, Creative Ops, was able to deploy a URL shortening tool that would compliment the All Arizona Baseball destination location. The domain would be easily recognizable, short and catchy, in the interest of trying to get it to spawn usage.

While traffic on the site is slowly beginning to increase, we have made arrangements to assist local sports website Fanster.com with their 2009 Spring Training coverage, which includes building out the Spring Training portion of their website. While this relationship will serve as an opportunity to increase local exposure in the Phoenix Metro area, we have also planned to partner up with one of the largest, most successful Metro Rail Blogs, Rail Life. Both organizations have been diligently shortening their URLs using the tool and for that we are both gracious and excited. Additional plans for the tool include integration with AZ Hardball.com‘s article pages for the delivery of links to friends.

Check it out today at http://strik.es

As a proof of concept, AZ Hardball was created during the Arizona Fall League. The Creative Ops marketing team decided since the phone was no longer ringing, it was time to watch some Fall Ball. The team created a destination site for everything that Major League Baseball had to offer in the state of Arizona. Taking advantage of the opportunity to be able to stay on top of all of the latest baseball developments in the state of Arizona and having a network that would be able to syndicate sports content, the site successfully launched in October of ’08 and is still running strong.

In short, the goal was to receive increased exposure to the interactive portion of the business. This was accomplished by providing and promoting content by using a viral marketing strategy. Within months, AZ Hardball content was being featured by several media outlets including USA Today and TNT. The marketing team succeeded by sending plenty of additional opportunity our way … and we all got to watch the sport we love too.

Redesigned a number of years ago, the board members were pleased with the update to the site and continued to maintain it on their own. Creative Ops decided to take the site one step further. By deploying a content management system for the rugby club, it enabled the client to make changes to the site on the fly on an as needed basis. Additionally, a user contributed photo gallery was added to the site and contact and registration controls were added to assist the Phoenix Rugby Club with managing their visitors and members information.

The project requirements included maintaining the original content and making it easier for the leaders of the organization to make changes on a regular basis. By providing the organization with a CMS implamentaiton, we achieved our client’s goals.