Three years after hiring its first editor to provide weekly coverage from a national perspective, MileSplit.US–-the national portal of the 50-state MileSplit Network-–has received a long-overdue makeover.
MileSplit CEO and founder Jason Byrne unveiled the new look today, complete with several navigational changes, as well.
The key element of the design is a focus on the athletes as the centerpiece of every page. The photos of athletes change each time a page is loaded and also rotate with the season: cross country runners in the fall and track & field athletes representing all events throughout the remainder of the year.
“We wanted to find a way to celebrate our sport and the great people who give so much of themselves to be a part of it,” said Byrne.
MileSplit COO and Director of Marketing Don Rich added, “we simply want to remind ourselves, each and every time we see our national site, that the athletes are why we do this.”
The new design also features a larger, central editorial image, which rotates among the top five national stories at the time.
In addition to the visual changes, the main navigational organization has been simplified to just six essential links: home, coverage, stats, news, discussion, and resources.
“We have eliminated the drop-down menu, an overly-complex tool left over from the early days of the web, and replaced it with a more easily understood single page for each of the categories,” Byrne said.
“The new design also reflects our commitment to continue to live up to our goal of being the premier high school track & field network in the country,” Byrne concluded.
MileSplit.US is managed by a four-person editorial and stats team consisting of Margot Kelly and Jasen Parks in the western U.S., and Aaron Rich and Brandon Miles, in the east.
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About MileSplit, Inc.
MileSplit is the premier network for high school track & field and cross country. It was founded in 2000 by then-college sophomore Jason Byrne on the belief that the heart of the sport is on a local, grassroots level. By facilitating the publishing and business process for 30+ state webmasters through powerful publishing tools, the network is able to provide in depth, state-by-state, coast-to-coast coverage of the sport. At the same time, these state portals feed content into a national database, enabling an unprecedented depth of coverage on the U.S. level as well. In 2009, the network launched MileSplit U, covering the sport at the collegiate level; and in 2010, launched a Canadian site, TnFnorth.ca.
The proprietary database software unites all of the important aspects of covering the sport--results, rankings, articles, videos, photos, statistics, and more--making the MileSplit Network the only online publisher in the sport with the tools to provide a high level of timely and comprehensive nationwide coverage.
MileSplit has a partnership with Universal Sports, which serves as its sales team for its national advertising inventory.
MileSplit, Inc. is a privately held Florida corporation. Its primary offices are located in Greater Orlando, Florida. MileSplit has a team of staff and affiliates located around the country. As an innovative company that embraces a forward-thinking approach to the web, MileSplit now runs its virtual datacenter completely in the Amazon cloud and utilizes the latest tools such as HTML5, jQuery, and mobile web apps.