Those of you who regularly scour the main Race-Calendar.com website, may well have noticed that over the past few days (and weeks, and months) a whole host of upgrades have gone live.
Over the weekend, we unveiled some of the most exciting new changes we’ve made for more than a year, as the logic behind race discovery took a huge leap forward.
In this post, I’m going to explain to you some of the new things that you can do over at Race-Calendar.com that you couldn’t before, and detail the many ways in which we’ve tried to make life easier for runners and race organisers.
Homepage Simplified
One of the first things we have done at Race-Calendar.com is simplified the home page. It starts with the website’s main feature: a large calendar containing every race. We’ve dropped in some popular filters to get you started.
Visit Race-Calendar.com to start your race search.
Local Radius Race Search (beta)
But wait, you might not want to find out about races all over the world, right? You probably want to find a race where you are right now – and this may be even more so if you are visiting a new place, or staying somewhere new for a while (e.g. you’re an avid runner, who just moved to a new country or state for business), well, you can do a Radius search of all races we’ve listed within x miles of your current city or location.
Go to the new “Races Near…” page to try this out. Please do report back by leaving a comment below with feature requests on this one – its public beta, which means your input is appreciated!
Improved Add Race Form
We’ve been working with event organisers to improve the Add Your Race form for a long time. A lot of this has involved getting detailed feedback from a LOT of event organisers. We heard your frustrations and removed them! BUT, we also heard your praise: you love the comprehensive free race listings (as you are runners like us) and you understand why we collect all that vital information about your race. So we’ve made the form simpler, yet more intuitive.
Improved Race Mapping
If you filled out that form, you’ll notice that we’re now mapping races by asking race organisers to drop a map pin onto a Google Map – this allows for super-accurate race start line maps. You can see this in action on all the lastest listings which are being added, for example:
You’ll notice that we’ve added the requirement to click for the map – this logic is that loading a map is quite slow, and we therefore only want to do this if the user wants to discover where the race start is, thereby improving user experience for those who didn’t need to see the map.
2014 Race Calendar Published
In case you didn’t get the email, or notice our little social media link, we’ve also just published the 2014 Running Calendar. This year’s calendar was really well received, and is hanging on runners’ walls around the world. Our 2014 calendar First Edition is now available at Amazon for worldwide delivery, from one link only (rather than last year’s three places to purchase). One calendar, available in one place, for global shipping. Get inspired to run next year that little bit harder!
Order your 2014 Running Calendar from Amazon today.
Got Comments? Think we can improve something else to make your experience better? We’d love to hear what you think! Leave a public comment below, contact us, or talk to us on Facebook or Twitter any time!
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