CLASSIC CITY MARATHON
PROJECT:
Event Website, Sales Platform
ROLE:
Web designer, content writer
TOOLS:
Squarespace, Google Suite, Photography
TIMEFRAME:
January 2023 - December 2023
PROJECT OVERVIEW
In the inaugural year of the Classic City Marathon, the website's design included a depth of user experiences, from race registration to travel planning and training information. An additional challenge for this project was creating the image of an experience that had not yet existed.
From January 2023 through January 2024, I was the Director of Marketing and Communications for the Classic City Marathon Association. In my role, I was responsible for building a comprehensive sales site for the marathon event and a social media and digital strategy. The project involved designing a large-scale website with deep navigation and branding.
DEVELOPMENT
SITE ARCHITECTURE
As the first-ever Classic City Marathon, the website was built entirely new. Referencing several aspirational marathons, I drafted the website’s structure. One of the challenges of the initial build was creating broad navigations that could be expanded on later. For example, the “Race Info” tab needed to contain core race information, but also, one day, it will have individual race experience pages. By creating broad categories, like “Involvement Opportunities,” we built up sponsorship, volunteer, and donor pages as these initiatives took effect.
By creating an overview page of involvement opportunities, links and forms could be added throughout the year, as new opportunities opened up.
STORYTELLING
How do you highlight something that hasn’t happened yet? One of the biggest challenges of building this race website was the lack of assets and stories to draw on. The Classic City Marathon is a nonprofit under the umbrella of the Athens Road Runners. So, in the spring of 2023, I attended various ARR races to capture content. By using close-up images and focusing on universal aspects of a race, like getting water, I created a portfolio of images that highlight a general race experience.
Without a historical set of images for the event, creating a compelling story required creativity and strategic content capturing. This image of a runner getting water looks like it could be from the marathon, but was actually from a 10K race!