Race-Calendar.com turns from a conversation to a fully functioning, popular running race calendar website within three months.
The partners at 24 Hour Trading were discussing running websites with personal trainer and experienced club runner (with Otley A.C.), Steve Haywood one evening during the summer of 2009.
This discussion centred around how difficult it had been to discover races in a new city (Edinburgh) without much local knowledge or a local contact in the running world. Steve, who used to travel with work, ran in locations around Britain and in some far-flung parts of Europe too. He told how he would often have loved to have been able to find a low-key race in a new place, but that, in the past, there was no real way to do this.
From these discussions, came the idea for a new running website: Race-Calendar.com was registered with a view to providing novice, improving and advanced runners with a comprehensive listing of races which are open to all comers up and down the UK, across Europe and the rest of the world.
The idea is twofold: to help runners discover new races in places they are visiting, or to make slightly longer trips for particular races across the UK; all the while helping the myriad small clubs and race organisers to promote their events on a nationally recognised race calendar website.
It seems this plan is coming together well- on Sunday, Race-Calendar.com received over 2,330 unique visitors, despite having only launched on 1 September 2009.
The reasons for Race-Calendar.com’s success?
There are many reasons that the Race-Calendar.com website has met with such remarkable early success – despite not spending a penny on advertising – and that is because:
- The website benefits from 24 Hour Trading’s market leading organic search engine rankings;
- The Race Calendar website is a relatively unique concept; and
- Race-Calendar.com differs from similar sites because is it entirely free to add races, and there is no registration required by the Race-Calendar.com website in any stage of adding, viewing or subscribing to receive updates.
Quick Links:
- Visit Race-Calendar.com
- Add a Race here;
- Submit Race Results here;
- Selected Races by Race Distance: 10k Races, 5k Races, Marathons, Half Marathons