Race Website New Template Beta

Note: The new Race Website has been released on January 2, 2017!

Soon after your New Year Eve’s celebration, we will be releasing a major upgrade for Race Websites. This will provide every race with a second, more modern option that has a lot of flexibility in the design. Here is a sample default page:

There are a bunch of new things going on:

• Race logo is on the upper left. No more RunSignUp logo at the top – increasing race brand visibility.
• “Sticky” top bar with SignUp and Donate buttons. When you scroll down the page there is always a “call to action”.
• Horizontal menu at the top of page gives more width to pages than the old side navigation. Great for Results and having a right column for sponsors
• Larger and full width banner image that auto-scales.
• Default overlay of shading so text of race, date and location can be easily read on the image.
• Event Tiles (a max of 8 show by default, and if there are more, they expand smoothly). And they have a cool ombré gradient to make them pop!
• New cleaner fonts and layout for custom sections

And it looks great on mobile:

The footer of the page is also new and improved:

• Note the “sticky header” is still there
• Convenient “Contact Race” link
• Race Logo
• Sponsors would appear here if the display at bottom option is selected

Layout Options

The new layout will be released as an option that is chosen in the new Race Theme page on the dashboard, which has been cleaned up to look like this (these accordion sections will make their way across many other dashboard areas of our site in the coming quarters):

Let’s start on the left of the Template Options, the “Hero Image Layout”. If we flip that to the Alternative Layout, it will give you the full view of the race banner image with a race title above and date/directions/social sharing below:

The next option changes the color of the sticky bar at the top of the page:

The next option makes the top header “unsticky”, so it disappears when scrolling down the page.

The final option will change the event tiles to be an event list:

 

We will be including a different set of default images for the new template, and you can upload your own (1500 X 400). If you want to use one of the old ones, just switch to Template 1, pick your image and save. Then switch to Template 2 and it will be brought over.

What’s Coming and When?

You can play with the Scott Coffee Race on one of the test servers at https://test3.runsignup.com/ScottCoffeeRun.

We plan on releasing this in early January. Before then you can play with this on your own at test3.runsignup.com and feel free to provide us suggestions and feedback (this is working with an old copy of the database of users so you may need to set up a new account and new race). We will be doing minor tweaks before then.

In early January, this will be an option that any race can switch to by just going to the Race Page Theme shown above. Towards the end of January, this will become the default template for all new races. We will also include a reminder when renewing races at some point as well.

Later this year we will likely introduce some additional templates to choose from. We will also be cleaning up and introducing new and simpler ways to set up your race menu and content.

The big change we will be introducing, hopefully by spring, is supporting custom domains. So instead of RunSignUp.com/MyRace, you will be able to use your existing domain or get a new one that is simply MyRace.com. We have the ability to do this today with large races in our Partner Program, but we will make this scalable so that we can support thousands of races with their own private domains. We hear from customers that they do not know how to change their website, or they pay $300 per year, or they have to pay a design firm $Thousands per year to maintain their websites, or they have an old design, or they do not have real-time data on it – like result posting or find a runner or registration and donations. We are hoping to do this for less than $50 per year for the custom domain and SSL certificate.