Helping to connect Missoula’s running community

Run Wild Missoula’s primary website is for club members to find out details regarding upcoming races and events. RWM’s signature race — the Missoula Marathon — has its own dedicated, and now connected, site. At the start of this project both sites felt dated and suffered from overly complex navigation. Both needed to transform to run better, and to better serve the running community.

PartnersCreative identified two key objectives — simplification and flexibility. The sites needed modern, custom templates that could accommodate a range of content types and lengths, be simple to maintain and handle surges in visitation. We also streamlined important features like shopping and registration with Run Wild Missoula’s third-party provider RunSignUp.

In order to create a related but unique look and feel between the two websites, we developed page templates that were flexible enough to use on either site. To accompany this flexibility, we reworked the website navigation to provide a permanent, easily accessible presence for RWM’s annual races. We developed site maps and a content plan to assess how best to accommodate content in the design and later to track content development. Wireframes were then used to inform site design across both sites. We created a custom, component-based design system to build out distinct, modern templates across both sites.

We created individual color schemes for each site based on the client’s existing palette to help maintain the two distinct identities. Another key piece of the design work involved reworking the RWM event calendar to display weekly, monthly and annual events while making these pages easy for runners to access and for RWM staff to update.

We also worked with the client to prepare content for migration. While RWM updated the content itself, we wrote new copy for each site’s homepage and migrated the bulk of existing content dynamically.

Once the club website was built we used it as the basis for the Missoula Marathon site, addressing the relevant design and content changes, and then launching the sites within a week of each other.

We also manage Run Wild Missoula’s Google Ad Grants SEM account. Once the two sites were live we updated landing pages and ensured that keywords and ad groups of the existing campaign aligned with the new sites.