Establishing a Digital Sense of Place

Dubai Sports City is a 50 million square-foot, mixed-use, master-planned development inspired by the spirit of sport. Since the destination launched ten years ago, many of its developments, programs, and facilities had been completed and the destination had begun to establish a unique sense of place. The destination’s digital presence, however, had not kept pace with its expansion and had begun to hinder business development.

The challenge was finding an effective way to showcase the full breadth of DSC’s offerings, facilities, partners, and programs in the context of a community halfway to realizing the full vision of its master plan. The website was also identified as a critical channel in DSC’s overall marketing effort to change the existing market perception of a stalled project to that of an active, thriving destination. The website also needed to support the sales team’s increasing demands as they prepared to launch new projects into the competitive Dubai real estate market.

Working closely with the DSC team, MBLM developed an interactive feature that lets users discover the details of the master plan according to their individual interests and preferences. The site’s architecture, user interface, and content were holistically considered to highlight DSC’s different components without making the user experience overwhelming. As a solution to the perceived stagnation of the development, MBLM conducted a photo/video shoot to create an image library capturing the liveliness of the community and wove the assets into a responsive website design. Our solution also provided a flexible front- and back-end platform for the sales team to manage, prioritize, and showcase their current offerings, all within the framework of the overall digital strategy.

Key features:

• Original bilingual content (English and Arabic)
• Content management system
• Interactive master plan with sort filters
• Responsive design, desktop/tablet

MBLM greatly enhanced Dubai Sports City’s digital presence through the development of a sophisticated website that better captures the brand’s value proposition. Through the optimization of content, visits to the website translated into foot traffic for the programs and facilities on location. In addition, the website provides Dubai Sports City with a platform to showcase new developments, initiative, programs, and project updates on an ongoing basis.