Poker Training Site: what have I done now.. HELP !!!

[tommylogic]

WOW.. what the heck did I bite off here?
The good news its a big one. The bad new is...? Tell me, please.

The scope is to basically recreate this site only better:
http://www.pokerxfactor.com/

The gig is to create the entire site basically reproducing this one. Easy enough, I could probably come up with some better design elements anyway, give it a bit more appeal, I suppose.

I need to know exactly what I have my hands on here though. I am to be required to do the ongoing maintenance as well. I am guessing that it will require ongoing video compresion and feeds for training, typical user logins that have varying degrees functionalities, etc.

What am I exactly looking at here? Any ideas on formats, development, design elements, etc would be VERY helpful. I imagine I will need to come up with application "add-ons" for the extended contract. There may be some possiblity of live poker games and so on.

Plugins, management.. what else?

WHOLY SMOKES there's a lot here !!! tell me there's not that much.

Thanks everyone, I know someone has had to do somehting like this already.

[Keely Hope]

Should be easy enough as you can see how to do it wrong!

[tommylogic]

ha!! Yeah.. I actually was sitting up worrying about this one a bit last night.
Thanks for all your inspiration there Keely.

The owner of this site is going to want this updated probably daily. My thoughts on that are to go at it kinda like a magazine. Maybe use some sort of plugin CMS solution.. My initial thougts on it were to use WordPress kinda like in that article I sent to that guy in the other post.

I am looking into AJAX plugins though. I dunno its pretty wide open. They are going to want to roll a lot of data from database no doubt. Any technical suggestions would be really cool.

[James Jones]

Don't know about technical but keeping the design as simple as possible would be a great help to you and would also help keep it looking simple

[tommylogic]

I agree there. I was shooting for simple. I am just a bit concerned with what apps are going to be required. I'm not a big app writer. I have someone here for that, but I was hoping for some suggestions for that.

btw.. nice pic James.Jones... is that a kitten or a beer can? hmmm can't place it but looks familiar.

[tommylogic]

OK... here are some more details on this darn site..

You will have to regularly update the site, most frequently posting instructional videos on winning strategy in multi-table and sit-and-go online poker tourneys.

The heart of the site will be the education center, which is where the Hand Viewer and videos will reside. Initially, it will take a little time to put together the first videos, but once we are off the ground, they’ll be coming in regularly to keep subscribers happy. There is also likely to be a blog page where at least 2 people will frequently drop in and give quick analysis and advice.

The Hand Viewer is clutch…if you don’t have the capacity to create something similar, you are out of the running. It will be a flash-based application and we need to be able to upload a hand history that will be automatically animated and able to play on the site.

Hmm.. looks like quite a bit of Flash video (not my first choice, but OK) and a CMS with a blogging forum?

Anyone have experience in the area? I have honestly not done a site with "subscriber-based" video access.

Where do I begin to quote that I wonder? I guess it would be billed as a plugin charge and designed similarly. I could still do it tableless maybe with a DIV for the vids...

I think they may be interested ina lightbox js similar to how i implimented it in my site on the "current" page.. only with video (not too hard, I suppose)

Thoughts on approach?