Creative Website Design Company

The Brief

firstoffthebike.com is Australia's first stop for a mix of Triathlon and Cycling news. It gives the inside edge with news, interviews, comment and race reports.

After enjoying a 2 year stint at Australia’s all-sports radio station, 1116AM SEN, First Off the Bike made the transition to the web in late ‘07. The success of this site set in motion a full redevelopment with Lava, going live early in October ‘09. The goal of this project was to achieve a polished and highly ambitious site that is suited to a passionate (and fanatical) audience that is highly IT literate.

Other world-leading triathlon and cycling sites were to be used as a reference, in particular to determine the content structure (architecture), and to achieve a menu structure that suited the extensiveness of firstoffthebike.com’s content (close to 1,000 articles!). Advertising revenue is key to the businesses success, therefore the new site needed to provide terrific advertising opportunities.

The site launch coincided with ’09 Kona Hawaii Ironman World Championship.

Lava’s Solution

Lava’s team had a heap of fun putting together this project.

The design styling is sporty and quite bold. We’ve used some organic shapes (curves and rounded corners) throughout, and a very bright and fresh colour pallet, inspired by the colors and texture of the lycra outfits worn by cyclists. The design features extensive photography, which was very carefully chosen, in particular, to reflect the 3 distinctly different types of triathlon race distances.

Aside from conventional content sections, the site features some really interesting content and functionality. Many of the sections have a blog/ comment style feature, to really encourage user interaction. This is complemented with social media tools, including Twitter, a Share widget, and RSS feed subscriptions.

The site has a multimedia gallery, which caters for images (photos), video and audio. Through Lava’s bells and whistles CMS, we have provided a bulk photo loading facility, along with a custom Flash audio player which is integrated into the main website. The client up uploads audio via the CMS in a generic MP3 format, with all of the conversion handled via our CMS automatically. The video is handled through YouTube, with the ability to embed clips directly into the gallery. This approach provides significant benefits, including utilizing YouTube’s terrific pre-existing video conversion tools, and also the social networking benefits of also having each clip accessible via the YouTube site and audience.

Some other nice touches include the ability via the CMS to create relationships between the article being viewed, and other articles and media from the Gallery. For example, when adding a new Race via the CMS, firstoffthebike.com can select articles from other sections, and media from the Gallery that is related. These related items are then visually presented underneather the selected article.

Lava’s team has also included a custom-build online advertising tool. The client can add leaderboard and tower advertisiements, and via the CMS, they can allocate these to designated sections and positons within the site. We have also provided reporting tools to monitor the performance of the advertisiements, such as the number of views/ impressions. This helps sell future advertisements.