USGA.org

Tradition runs deep in the game of golf but even the United States Golf Association (USGA) — golf's governing body and a staunch preserver of its past — appreciates the need to change with the times. By late 2008, for instance, USGA members and other golf enthusiasts across the country still couldn't get online access to the huge amount of critical information owned by the Association — information such as the basic rules and regulations of golf, course data and locations, event information and more.

USGA called upon Clock Four to digitize all of this data and lead the huge effort it would require to migrate more than 200,000 data points to a new, updated website. USGA also asked us to add features that would help improve its ability to communicate with members and keep them better informed of timely news and developments. The deadline: June of 2009, just before the U.S. Open, one of the sport's premier events, when traffic on the site would be expected to soar.

To build a site aligned with USGA's vision for its future, Clock Four began custom-building full content management, publishing and server systems robust enough handle critical, data-rich tasks such as:

Delivering timely news, announcements, updates and other information to USGA members.
Providing online access to "The Rules of Golf" and "Decisions on the Rules of Golf," which the USGA co-owns and co-authors.
Offering a Course Finder tool that would enable members to locate any one of the organization’s 9,500 member clubs, courses and qualified training facilities.
Accommodating the heavy site traffic that results from the sports main events each year.

Clock Four also consolidated and migrated roughly 80,000 pages of content from the USGA's previous site, including importing every member's profile and handicap information into the new Ektron CMS. (Given the hundreds of thousands of critical data points in this migration, it's not hard to understand why Clock Four received Ektron's "Implementation of the Year Award" when the project wrapped.) The updated site also featured a Clock Four-built video player and a photo browser, along with social networking components, equipment directories and a powerful search engine.

When the 2009 U.S. Open rolled around, members of the Clock Four team joined members of the USGA team at the event, delivering real-time training and making real-time news updates to the site hand-in-hand from the organization’s reporting tent.