Project
First Off The Bike
An Australian triathlon publication with nine sections, built from a supplied design
The homepage design, January 2015. These are the page designs the site was built to, not screenshots of the finished site.
First Off The Bike was an Australian triathlon publication, covering racing, the athletes, gear, training and travel. I built the website. The design came from the client's side rather than from me, and my job was turning it into something that worked and could hold years of publishing.
The images on this page are the page designs the site was built to, dated January 2015. The website itself is long gone, so what you are seeing is the plan it was built from rather than photographs of the finished site.
Project Scope
- Built the site from the designs supplied
- Nine sections, most with their own sub-sections
- Photo, video and podcast galleries
- A travel guide built around a map
- Shop linked out to the existing store
The challenge
Triathlon covers three sports and a lot of ground. The publication wrote about racing, the professionals, the weekend competitors, swimming, cycling, running, gear, coaching, nutrition, women's racing and travel. All of that had to be reachable from one menu without the menu becoming a wall of words.
The other half of it was that a publication accumulates. Whatever shelving gets chosen at the start is the shelving you live with, and a structure that copes with fifty articles can collapse under a thousand. Getting it wrong is not something a new coat of paint fixes later.
What I built
Nine sections, and beneath most of them a set of sub-sections a reader could drop into directly. The whole structure was agreed on a single sheet of paper before anything was built. It is an hour of work that saves weeks later.
A shape agreed before anything was built
Every section, every sub-section and every kind of page on one sheet, signed off first. Races broke into six kinds of event. Tech broke into swim, bike, run and gear. Nobody discovered a whole kind of page nobody had thought of, halfway through.
Galleries as their own destination
Photos, video and podcasts were each given their own home rather than being buried inside articles. For a sport that produces this much photography, the pictures are half the reason people come back.
A travel guide you browse by map
The travel section was designed to open on a world map with the regions marked, so a reader planning a race abroad could pick a part of the world rather than scroll a list of place names, with a dropdown for anyone who preferred it.
The shop stayed where it was
The business already sold through a store on another platform, so the plan sent people straight there rather than rebuilding it. One shop to keep stocked instead of two, and nothing to migrate.
Across the design
Each section was given its own colour, a label and a trail back to the homepage, so a reader always knew where they were
The travel section opens on a map rather than a list
The result
A publication with room to grow into, rather than one that would need re-shelving after a year. The structure carried three sports, the whole spread of racing from the professionals down to weekend competitors, and a travel section that behaved like its own small guide.
It also sits in a run of publications. Between this, CyclingTips, WhichCar and 4X4 Australia, four titles across cycling, triathlon and motoring, all with the same underlying problem: a lot of content, arriving constantly, that has to stay findable.
If you publish and your website is starting to feel like a filing cabinet nobody can open, that is fixable. See how I approach a website build, or get in touch.
Common questions about this project
Often, and it is a normal way to work. A designer or an agency hands over the page designs and I turn them into the working site. It suits businesses who already have someone they trust on the visual side, or who have had a brand designed and now need it built.
It depends entirely on how much you publish. A business with six pages should not have nine sections. A publication putting out articles every week needs enough shelving that a reader can find last month's piece, and it needs deciding up front rather than bolted on later once the mess has set.
It is a single sheet showing every section, what sits under it, and which pages share a layout. Agreeing it before anything is built is what stops the expensive version of this conversation happening halfway through, when a whole section turns out to need a kind of page nobody had planned for.
Yes, and sometimes you should. This site sent people straight out to the shop the business already ran elsewhere, rather than rebuilding it. That meant no second shop to keep stocked, and nothing to move across. Bringing a shop onto your own site is worth doing when the range justifies it.
Yes, it is one of the areas I work in most. CyclingTips, WhichCar and 4X4 Australia are all publications, and the problems repeat: a lot of content, readers who cannot find things, advertising, and traffic that arrives in waves. This was the triathlon one.
