Round the Island Race
Bringing Round the Island into 2025, and it’s been plain sailing.
Moving from a restrictive bespoke CMS to a responsive, fast and good-looking interactive site gets us line honours.
We were approached to rebuild the Round the Island Race website from the ground up, focusing on usability, aesthetics, responsiveness, and engagement.
The previous website relied on a tired custom CMS that wasn’t mobile-friendly, SEO-optimised, or accessible. We replaced it with a hybrid solution combining Nautical Cloud and a heavily customized WordPress build, packed with unique features to handle high traffic volumes and rich media.
This included developing an immersive media section with search functionality based on boat metadata, such as sail numbers (coming very soon). Additionally, we introduced a streamlined system that allows users to easily request images for personal or editorial purposes, simplifying the process for the Island Sailing Club team and their photographers.
We’ve made great efforts to ensure the website is easy to manage for the ISC team without requiring a steep learning curve.
The result so far is a fast, user-friendly website that’s accessible, SEO-ready, and secure.
Moreover, the site is hosted on our sustainable, green ARM-based infrastructure, reducing costs by approximately 63% compared to a similar AWS-only solution. What’s not to love?
With more features, tweaks, and polish still to come, check back here or visit roundtheisland.org.uk to follow our progress.
AWS is an industry leader in hosting and compute platform. We use AWS for their use of renewable energy and net zero goals.
Adobe Creative Cloud including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro and more
CSS is the clothes of the internet, allowing us to style every element of a website.
Foundation is an advanced SCSS/CSS front end framework with a focus on speed and accessibility. (We ❤️ it).
HTML5 is the very building blocks of all internet facing things. We work hard to produce clean HTML output for resilience and performance.
Javascript is a scripting language to handle anything from simple manipulation/animations to full blown applications.
Node.js is a javascript engine to allow for compiling and maintaining our Javascript code bases and build tools.
PHP is a programming language that's open source, frequently updated and maintained. Since 2011 its had nearly an 80% marketshare globally.
SASS/SCSS allows us to write faster, more consistent and precise CSS as well as containing some cool and useful features outside of the scope of regular CSS (We also 😍 SASS with Foundation).
WordPress is a CMS (Content Management System) that powers a lot of the web (43% of the whole internet, 65% of CMS driven sites). It's ease of use, frequent updates and available tools make it a perfect choice for a lot of applications.
Yarn is another popular Javascript build tool.
Woocommerce is an easy-to-use, extendable and maintained e-commerce plugin for WordPress.