Cortex Worldwide transforms Homeless World Cup website ahead of 2016 tournaments
Digital specialist Cortex has transformed the Homeless World Cup (HWC) website to help it better engage its global audience ahead of the forthcoming tournaments this July. Offering its services at no cost to help support the charity’s work, Cortex used its I/AM online platform to seamlessly manage and enhance content on its website. The project, which is still ongoing, has already included work on 120 pages, and the translation and localisation of content into more than 20 different languages.
The Homeless World Cup (HWC) is a social movement which uses football to inspire homeless people to change their own lives. The organisation covers 70 countries and involves an estimated 100 million people across the world, but as the Edinburgh-based digital company discovered – via Scotland’s economic development agency Scottish Enterprise – the HWC global website urgently needed a bit of TLC. Despite attracting a wide audience, its site was only available in English and lacked localisation or country specific content.
“The Homeless World Cup has been running as a street soccer event since 2001 and is due to be staged in Glasgow 10-16 July of this year,” said Cortex founder and managing director Peter Proud. “We have the expertise to transform and manage websites across multiple microsites and regions, so we wanted to offer HWC a helping hand to significantly enhance their online capabilities. As a unique global event already, they needed a truly global online presence to match, and we wanted to help them achieve this.”
Mel Young, Homeless World Cup Foundation co-founder and president said of the project: “We’re grateful to Cortex for the support they’ve provided the Homeless World Cup in terms of allowing us to considerably widen accessibility to our website given the global nature of our organisation. For us, the power of the Homeless World Cup is the scale of the global message, and being able to deliver a more functional, multi-language website is a key facet of that.”
The content is driven by WordPress. Cortex was tasked with ingesting the existing site – like-for-like – with all the assets “lifted out” into Microsoft Azure. A revised version is being delivered across the globe, initially in five data centres (spread from the US west coast down through South-East Asia), in a highly secure manner. The site is being initially translated into English, French, German, Portuguese and Norwegian with stories featuring images and video assets targeted at a particular country.
“We’re talking about 70 countries where, obviously they do not all speak English,” said Cortex technical director Mark Rodger. “People want to go onto this website and see the content in their own language and targeted digital assets such as images and video relevant to the local country. I/AM platform enables that with consumate ease and no outages.”
Cortex has already delivered country-specific content, languages and digital assets, images and video, and will continue to work on specific styling tweaks for different countries. The project will continue with the final delivery a few months ahead of the tournaments to allow the team to deliver a completely refreshed user experience (UX).
Cortex has just finished a busy first 12 months of operations applying its Integrated Agile Marketing (I/AM/) online platform to a portfolio of blue chip clients including Microsoft Education, Dyson and Saban Brands (including “Power Rangers”), with more clients in the pipeline.