Standing in the Virtual Gallery Without Much to See

One of the sites we developed during our busy 2006 was juliewellsgolf.com. You golf diehards may remember her from her stint on ‘Big Break V‘ – The Golf Channel’s highly successful and entertaining reality show. We had a blast developing it and Julie is a lot of fun to work with. She totally breaks the stereotype of spoiled professional athletes.Julie Takes a Swing

Last week Julie kicked off her 2007 season on the Duramed FUTURES Tour. Unfortunately for the Brand5 team, we have not been able to see her play in-person yet this season (but we really want to be there Julie!). So like the rest of her fans, we have been forced to follow along online. Fortunately the FUTURES site does a decent job of updating scores.

One of the things I have noticed while tracking Julie and her peers is that she is in the minority when it comes to athletes and websites. Julie, unlike almost everyone else on the FUTURES Tour, actually has a website. The overwhelming majority of players on this tour do not have any sort of web presence whatsoever.

I did a quick (and unscientific) audit of the league’s player list, and these were the sites I was able to find:

perryswenson.com
heatherangell.com
jennygleason.com

Believe it or not, this small sample size is typical of pro sports as a whole. Athletes with sites are few and far between. Those that do have sites are rarely addressing them from a brand perspective. Most athletes with sites are happy to have any sort of web presence and have not taken full advantage of the power of the medium.

For that reason we are proud of what we have created with Julie. Number one, she has an official place she can point her fans to if they want to know more about her. Second, they can hear directly from her in her blog. She does an awesome job of sharing with her fans all things related to her career. It’s extremely powerful and she deserves a lot of credit.

Good luck to Julie this season. In the meantime, we need to get back to work. There are a lot of athletes who need websites.

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