Objectives: Fit941 is the premier fitness and health magazine in the Sarasota/Bradenton area and their readers deserve a website that’s as fast they are. We wanted to deliver an overhaul of their website’s performance so that they could deliver the image heavy and content rich articles that their audience loves without losing any of them to slow load times or a poor mobile experience. Beyond that we wanted to take the complexity of their old system and replace it with a simple solution that streamlined their submission and payment process.
How we did it: They already loved their current design so we started by taking that look and rewriting it from the ground up to deliver as many optimizations as we could while adding all of the appropriate mark up and tags for the best SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
A lot of the slowdown of their previous site came from poorly written plugins for their business directory and event calendar. These plugins are written for a broad array of use cases and as a result have an awful lot of excess code, bugs, performance issues and design inconsistencies which ultimately led to a mediocre user experience. So, we worked together to find all of the features that they wanted and put together a custom system that did what they wanted it to do and nothing that they didn’t. If you’re a developer and curious about what we did, you can check out our usage guide here.
This increased the speed of the site and reduced the amount of time wasted adding businesses and events. Adding a business alone used to require them to fill out eight different fields of information and now only requires three. When you’re adding hundreds of businesses all of that extra clicking and typing really adds up.
Finally, we worked on their article, calendar, and pulse item (brief, 300 word stories for their magazine) submission process. This used to involve submitting some information and taking a customer afterwards to a payment page that they could (and often times did) ignore leaving Fit941 in the lurch because they’d need to verify payment of every single piece of submitted content. We fixed this by putting together a submission process that took payment before anything was ever handed over eliminating the stress and frustration that comes with not knowing who has paid for what. An especially taxing thing to deal with when you’re on deadline to get the latest issue out.