irukado

MaxRPM

When I first saw MaxRPM, it was a very informative, but relatively unstructured website providing news for the motorcycle racing community within Northern Ireland.

As the official website of a local racing body, with many exclusive stories on local events, it had a lot of potential, but simply wasn't living up to it for various reasons.

In talks with the client, and with further analysis of the website, I identified a number of problems, ranging from simple broken images and a poor color scheme to more fundamental usability flaws such as layout inconsistencies and content that was impossible to find.

I knew MaxRPM could be great. As such, I encouraged the client to make some more effort, and voluntarily worked longer hours on the project myself.

When I was done, MaxRPM was an entirely new site: besides the basic news etc., it had an entensive database about everything in the Northern Ireland motorbike racing scene. This included photos, videos, racetrack routes, rider details, and much more. Each simply created new article would automatically link all of this together, making the even a basic news entry highly valuable as a way to encourage readers to explore the site more fully.

Obviously, the added value of so much extra information greatly increased the so-called "stickiness" of the site, which is widely regarded as the most important measurement of a website's success.

In a few short months, use of the site skyrocketed, and the owners found themselves warmly welcomed by large-scale advertising organisations who would previously have had little interest in them.

Soon after, the site also won special mention in national UK E-Commerce Awards, despite being slightly unsuitable for the category it was submitted to.