2023 UCI Cycling World Championships
An unprecedented sporting event celebrating the power of the bike in Scotland
The Challenge
The event will also act as a catalyst for sustainable and inclusive change, by inspiring people to get on their bikes through mass participation events. As such, the website needs to celebrate the ‘power of the bike’ by showcasing cycling as a sport for everyone, the power of cycling for climate change and Scotland as a great cycling nation.
The first iteration of the website containing all core features and content types launched in July 2022, followed by a second release later in September 2022.
The Objectives
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Engage audiences and promote the power of the bike
This innovative event needs to enable cyclists and para-cyclists, amateur riders, cycling enthusiasts and fans to rejoice the power of the bike. Consequently, the project had a strong focus to reach and engage with both old and new audiences to inspire cycling across Scotland and the world, by showcasing cycling as a fun, inclusive and accessible sport.
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Establish a site with all venue and event information
The key aim was to create a single place for all event information, showing the types of events, schedules, and venues that will be available during the 11 days of the championships. Additionally the website needs to promote and direct users to purchase tickets and merchandise as well as signing up for news and alerts.
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A flexible website to evolve as the championships progress
It also needs to be flexible and scalable in order to efficiently serve fans and audiences before, during, and after the events, while also showcasing partners, funders, and travel packages provided by third parties.
The Insights
Key Features
Umbraco was selected to provide flexible templates and components to facilitate the evolution of the website moving from before, during, and after the event. The Microsoft Azure hosting infrastructure has also been configured to support significant spikes in traffic, which are expected as part of the ticket sales launch and during the event itself in August 2023.
The website has been integrated with MailChimp to facilitate newsletters and communications about ticket launches and further event information. It also invites users to apply for jobs and volunteering opportunities, and engage with inspirational videos and stories from amateur and professional cyclists across Scotland.
Flexible event and venue information pages provides everything the audience needs to know including information about the event itself with image galleries and fun facts, venue information encompassing Google Maps integration, promotion of the existing champions in a specific discipline, and broader information about the specific host regions across Scotland. The site also features a countdown timer on all pages.
A schedule overview was built for users to have a single overview of the events, dates, and venues that take place during the 11 days of the championships.
The Process
Discovery
- Understand the key user needs and business requirement
- Content analysis and production of website content model
- Information architecture and Treejack testing
- Functional requirement gathering
CMS Development
- Umbraco CMS development work
- Set up of secure and scalable cloud hosting solution in Azure to cope with traffic spikes
- Integration of MailChimp newsletter forms
- Signposts to ecommerce and ticketing sites
Performance
- Implementing analytics framework to measure website performance
- Implementing SEO recommendations to establish search result rankings
Testing and Handover
- Functional and non-functional testing
- Spike, load and soak testing aligned with predicted traffic peaks
- CMS training and set up for content governance procedures
Get in Touch
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