Roma website honoured with ‘Best in Class’ status by Interactive Media Awards

The awards, which are run by the Interactive Media Council and were launched in 2006, recognise the highest standards of excellence in website design and development and honour organisations for their outstanding achievement.

Websites are judged in five categories – with 100 points available for each category.

Sites that receive between 460 and 479 points receive an Outstanding Achievement award, while those that score between 480 and 500 are deemed Best in Class.

After a comprehensive judging process, asroma.com, which was launched in December 2015, was awarded a score of 492 out of 500, ranking the site Best in Class, the highest possible honour in the Sports category.

The full breakdown of scores for asroma.com in the five categories was as follows:

Content: 100/100

Design: 98/100

Feature Functionality: 100/100

Usability: 99/100

Standards Compliance: 95/100

“We’re delighted that asroma.com has been honoured with this title by the Interactive Media Awards,” said Paul Rogers, AS Roma’s Head of Digital. “When we first teamed up with our digital partner Omnigon to reimagine what a football club website could be, our goal wasn’t to win awards. Our mission was simply to deliver the best possible online experience for our supporters all over the world. We wanted to create a website that wasn’t only used by fans but actually created by them.

“To do this, we became the first football club to implement a crowdsourcing approach to not just the design and functionality of the new site but also the content proposition. We reached out and asked fans what content they wanted to consume and then empowered supporters to actually play an active role in creating that content - from photography, graphic design and infographics to videos, opinion articles and weekly columns.

"In 2016, this approach saw a year-on-year increase of 107% in website page impressions and a 46% increase in website unique visitors. Now we need to build on these numbers and this award and deliver an even better online service to supporters.”

Domenica Alban, spokeswoman for IMA commented: "Each entry went through a comprehensive evaluation process. In the end, the website earned exceptionally high marks across all evaluation criteria."

David Nugent, OMNIGON’s Chief Commercial Officer, added: “This is an incredible honour for everyone in our organisation. Our teams worked hand in hand with our partner, culminating in a final product we are all incredibly proud of.”