Mud Run Guide Web Redesign - The highest-trafficked website worldwide for the sport of Obstacle Course Racing (OCR). Founded in 2012 by Brett Stewart and Chris Lewis in 2012.
Project Challenges: mudrunguide.com's SEO/SEM are top-ranked in the industry with nearly 1 million page views/month - extremely high for a "fringe" sport with approximately 6 million participants worldwide - any redesign efforts must retain or improve MRG's stellar SEO rankings. To compound these efforts, we needed to make the site more appealing visually, easier to navigate for end users (70% of mudrunguide.com's organic search traffic comes from first-time visitors) and broaden advertising opportunities for brand partners while onboarding new editorial and social staff to increase site content.
The re-"design" effort was led by information architecture needs with an eye for aesthetics, which can be difficult for some designers who are not intimately familiar with the much bigger picture of maintaining and increasing website visibility, traffic, and income.
BEFORE: Version 1.2 of Mud Run Guide circa 2014. The original 2012 WordPress theme was stretched to its limits to provide multiple dynamic feeds (visible in this small image are (4) dynamic XML-driven queries providing information tailored to each user) as well as optimize advertising space, and organize information flow.
Redesign Steps 2-5 (the following 4 images below): Selecting and adapting a magazine style WordPress template to all the customizing needed to pair the existing content and functionality with a new frontend.
Navigation began to be one of our biggest challenges, the implementation of a multi-level "uber menu" provided a ton of options for categorizing 1000's of pages of content, but brought with it the additional effort of reclassifying and retagging all existing editorial content. This effort would optimally lead to increasing SEO lift, improved user experience, and a cleaner, more dynamic UI.
Final Test Version: After approximately 3 months of iterative design, development, and testing, we released a beta version of Mud Run Guide 2.0 which highlighted our exceptional print and video content while providing multiple new opportunities for expanded advertising.
Mud Run Guide Today: Over 2 years since the redesign effort, SEM value has topped over $247,000, traffic has steadily progressed following industry trends, and editorial staff has increased to nearly a dozen contributors. With MRG's high SEO value and traffic, we switched to a 3rd party marketing platform for advertising, boosting our CPC value while retaining our in-house advertising for OCR-specific products and events.
