GetRunning Marathon Tours and Training Website

Posted April 1st, 2011 in Case Studies and SilverStripe

When I'm not programming or writing web content I like to get out and run marathons, hence setting up the New Zealand Running Calendar to help people find running events in New Zealand. I met Gaz Brown from GetRunning through the running calendar and moved his existing static-ish website over to SilverStripe. GetRunning specialise in marathon training and marathon tours.

Original GetRunning website

Here's a couple of screenshots of the original GetRunning website.

The first is the homepage which doesn't really do much other than expect the visitor to click through to one of the content pages to actually find out any information.

The second screenshot shows the "about us" page which is what should really have been the homepage. All the other pages in the old website use the same style template as this one.

The original website didn't really utilise browser width all that well and the navigation was small and cramped. There was also the somewhat useless homepage and it wasn't at all well optimized for search engines. It still got some OK traffic from search engines though.

New GetRunning website using SilverStripe CMS

I'm no designer so all we did was to tweak the layout a bit, making it wider and the navigation a bit bigger and spaced out a bit more. The original "about us" page is now the homepage.

We've also added a second column where Gaz can list his sponsers and other such information. A link to the Facebook page is now in the navigation as well, and the site as a whole is better optimized for the search engines.

The content has all been loaded into SilverStripe CMS so Gaz can easily update the content himself, including adding and removing images and links from the sponsors list.