PGA Championship

After a series of micro-sites built for The Senior PGA and the Open Championship, we have finally arrived at the "big kahuna" of golf tournaments - The PGA Championship.

This site uses the same template developed for The Open Championship, but with about ten times the content and millions more unique visitors. Most of the site is about the same, with one big difference - the upper-Flash area on the home page has been expanded to include a rich media sponsorship (Cadillac) and a revamped course tour.

For Cadillac, the player writes a Shared Object to visitors' hard drives so that it displays once per visit every 24 hours. If the user refreshes their browser, or returns later in the day, the Cadillac sponsorship is reduced to a small slug in the lower left corner. Users can then reopen the ad, if they enjoy watching ads.

As for the course tour, it functions in both auto and manual mode. The auto mode is just like the last one, in which jpegs are dynamically loaded and cross-faded. But this time, the course data is loaded via XML and displayed in a small tab. By clicking the tab, a manual interface appears, and the user can easily navigate between holes. At each hole, the user can then click "info" for a description of the hole, and "video" for an in-line video fly-over. The navigation, and all graphical elements, are drawn with ActionScript. No bitmaps or items in the library. Total file size of the tour? 4k (not counting imagery and videos). Add that to the size of the XML driven site navigation, and together they're 9k - about the size of a couple of gifs.

With that, Tiger tees off in 10 minutes. Off we go.