www.strictlydancers.com

The professional dancers of the BBC’s hit TV show Strictly Come Dancing perform and teach at dozens of balls, studios and hotels while the series isn’t on our screens – but there was no way for fans of the show to find out where their favourites were appearing.

We created Strictly Dancers as a central place for the Strictly professionals and event promoters to list their events in one user-friendly, easily searchable place. We took advantage of the powerful categorisation features of WordPress to enable fans to filter events by dancer, location and date, and a custom Google Map plots the locations of every event onto a map of the British Isles to make it straightforward for fans to find events near them.

We integrated Google AdSense advertising into the site as a revenue source, as well as including an Amazon shop from which fans can buy Strictly Come Dancing DVDs, books and CDs.

To promote the site as widely as possible, we set up a Strictly Dancers group on Facebook, as well as a Twitter account. Now, when a dancer or event promoter lists a new event on the website, we send a message to the members of the Facebook and post a Tweet on Twitter to let everyone know about it.

The site has been a real hit with fans as well as with the Strictly dancers and promoters running dance events.

We learned so much and made so many contacts during the process that we decided to organise our own events locally. See Strictly Kent for more details.