Extreme Make-Over

CyclingTips has undergone a few of design tweaks over the years as the site has evolved. The last design iteration served us well, but there have been so many add-ons, tweaks, and kludges that it was becoming a mess. It was due for a clean-up and we ended up building it from the ground up. It’s been six months in the making.

What’s changed?

Not as much as you might think. One thing you’ll notice is that the main feature article is punctuated with a massive full-screen image. I’ve always thought: if you’re gonna be a bear, be a grizzly. We have so many excellent photographers contributing and showcasing their work is one of my priorities.

The way the articles are organised on the homepage is basically the same as before. A simple chronological order with the most recent articles at the top. There’s no difference in the articles in the middle section below the main feature. We just needed space for the race results and “more news” section.

The more news section is a place where we’ll feature articles that may be press releases or newswire items that we think you’ll be interested in. In short, it’s content that deserves attention, but it’s not necessarily original content.

Race results haven’t changed, but we believe the frontpage layout is better that before. There’s lots of new features being developed in our race results section, so stay tuned.

“Feature of the Day” is the section where we showcase the Photo of the Day (POTD) and videos/short films. There is also a place for Instagram hashtags that may be topical at the time. For our supporting advertisers, we are skinning this page in high quality banners which enhance the content, not distract from it.

For all you tech geeks, in the background we’ve continued using WordPress as our CMS. However, in the four years the site has been running we’ve made so many workarounds and kludges that we decided to build this from scratch. We’re now running on Amazon EC2 servers with Cloudfront for caching to accommodate the growth, speed and traffic requirements.

There are still lots of features that haven’t been released yet, and they’ll be deployed one by one as we complete them.

Unfortunately legacy versions of Internet Explorer (pre IE8) cannot be supported. I’m very sorry, but this is a small minority of users and it will cost an arm and a leg to get this working. Please download Chrome or Firefox to get the best experience. Mobile support will be coming soon.

Please report any issues in the comments section of this post. We have a whole list of them that we’ll be working through, but you’ll probably discover some bugs that we haven’t experienced.

Thank you to Tom Clayton for the design, Ben Dunn for the web development, and Gus Gollings for technical advice.