London Landmarks Half Marathon

The challenge

The London Landmarks Half Marathon was a brand new race, so the organisers needed a website that captured their vision for the event and encouraged would-be runners to sign up. The timescales for website delivery were very tight, due to the huge amount of behind-the-scenes negotiation and authorisation typical of a public event of this size.

The brief

This event is not your average half marathon. As well as being the only half marathon to go through both the City of London and the City of Westminster, it has the additional dimension of taking runners on a cultural tour. Runners are encouraged to engage with the city’s landmarks and heritage, learning some of its quirky and hidden secrets along the way. Therefore it was crucial that our design was something a bit different, visually engaging users while also showing the event’s charitable focus.

Our solution

As this was the first ever London Landmarks Half Marathon, it was important for potential runners to understand what they would experience and why they should sign up. With that in mind, we designed static maps with overlays that pull out key differentiating aspects of the route split into three main categories: the Grand, the Quirky and the Hidden. Our icon choices also reflect the event’s personality and encourage users to engage further.

We applied the LLHM brand yellow across the site, which gives it a positive, energetic feel and immediately shows users that this is not just another typical running event. The success of this approach is shown by the fact that over 70,000 people signed up to our pre-registration page. With only 5,000 open places available, there was a huge demand when event registration opened, with 8,000 concurrent users per second clicking on the site.

We had planned for this through page caching, server preparation and configuration, as well as a backup content delivery network implementation – which meant that the website kept performing well throughout this huge spike in traffic.

Charity is at the heart of the London Landmarks Half Marathon, so we highlighted partner charities and created automated advertising space as an additional engagement tool. We extended this with Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers to allow clicks on ads and logos to be tracked and give extra insights into site visitor activity.