Kali Protectives came to us looking to build a rider component to their website. They wanted two things – a site that would let them showcase the latest exploits of their pro riders, and a site that would let aspiring amateurs create profiles and try to convince the company that they were worthy of sponsorship. In short, they wanted us to build a small-scale social networking site for athletes.
Today, you can see the results at kaliriders.com. Riders can log on to the company’s website, create a profile, upload photos, bring in videos from YouTube, Myspace or Vimeo, link to their profiles on other social networking sites and post their latest race results and contest wins. It’s a pretty full-featured site. What you won’t see when you’re cruising through is the administrative backend that lets Kali update, administer and modify the site without much help from us.
The neat thing about this project is that we were able to create something this robust for an up-and-coming company. Take a look at any of the big action-sports brands’ websites. You likely won’t find anything like Kali’s rider site, and you certainly won’t find anything like this that was done on such a tight budget. Kali spent a good chunk of change to have the site built, but we were able to work with them to keep it far outside the six-figure budgets many agencies would charge for this type of custom development.
