Motor Sport Magazine

The mission

• Perform a website audit to identify weaknesses and opportunities to improve traffic and user experience
• Update the existing website design to be more modern and responsive
• Improve the overall SEO performance
• Advise on future digital strategy

Getting under the website’s bonnet

To create the most effective website design and improve Motor Sport’s search engine performance, we conducted an extensive audit of the website.

We looked at:

• Overall design and areas that needed improvement
• User journeys—for those reading and subscribing
• Analytics
• Traffic and SEO
• Engagement
• Competition

The final report made recommendations for the website’s new design, as well as technical changes to improve rankings. We worked through these ideas with Motor Sport to develop a final website design brief.

New digital bodywork

A key consideration was improving the user experience across the website. By simplifying the header, navigation and home page hero area, it’s easier for users to find what they want.

The main pages were restructured to have fewer columns, and allow for bigger pictures, headlines and better placement of advertising.

Article pages are easier to read and have a more editorial design, using pull-out boxes and quotes helping users to identify key information quickly.

New functionality includes a most popular/shared widget to encourage readers to explore the website more. Motor Sport can also set a modal window to appear for promotions.

The website has a responsive design so mobile and tablet users can read on the move and have a seamless experience.

Improving digital marketing performance

During design we made a number of technical SEO improvements to drive more traffic to the website including:

• Fixing Google Webmaster tools issues
• Rewriting URLs to be more search engine friendly
• Implementing rich snippets such as Google+ authorship and publisher to improve ranking results
• Submitting the site for Google News

We continue to work with Motor Sport to improve the site and advise on other areas such as digital, email marketing and content marketing.

And so…

The new design retains Motor Sport’s classic look but with improved information architecture and more consistent application of styles, bringing the website up to date.