Web Designers, Web Design Brighton
O'Neill Europe

O'Neill are one of the most recognised surf and snowboard brands in the world, established in 1956 by Jack O'Neill.

Jack invented the surf wetsuit in 1952 during cold winter surf sessions in California.

He still surfs today aged 85.

Client's brief

O'Neill run a series of world class snowboard and surf events, attracting top competitors from around the world. Each event gains huge media coverage via the press and extreme sports TV channels.

Each event has its own website to promote the event and broadcast the action live around the world as it happens. You can literally watch the event live via the websites.

We were asked to develop a series of content managed sites for the events that can be updated with the latest video streams, photos, results and news from anywhere in the world; including a boat cruising around in the south pacific.

Here's what we did

We developed a core content management system (CMS) that could be used for every site and simply be re-skinned with the latest designs for each event. The CMS has modules for each area including News, Rider Profiles, Event Information, Videos, Images Galleries, Downloads, Voting, and Competitions.

We have now developed over a dozen event websites for O'Neill in the past 3 years and are on the second generation of event sites. The new sites use flash extensively. Our CMS system feeds data into the flash sites via Json files which then updates the site content - very nifty.

Our results

The CMS has allowed O'Neill the flexibility to update the websites whether they are on a beach, up a mountain, in a hotel room or in a boat in the middle of the pacific.

Because the CMS can be re-used for each event, we can deploy websites rapidly without using up costly development time.