Global Cycling Network

Intro

We've always been fanboys of Global Cycling Network. Hell, we very nearly bought an e-bike on their recommendation alone. So when they came to us to work on improving their content velocity and programmatically building a multi-step categorisation system we could have jumped off our chairs.

We gelled in with their incredible team and became the go-to Sanity consultants to ensure every aspect of structured data had been thought about, all the way down to little UX interactions that empowered their marketing team.

References as structure

We created an entire system using slug nodes, and slug clusters to enable hierarchal content from the top level, all the way down to 4 deep slug clusters. The best part was, no developer was required to create new page routing because of a clever way of handling GROQ queries.

It meant that the site was rapid-fast, scalable to thousands of documents within hundreds of user generated paths. We really pushed the boat out when it comes to reusability and you can see how it permeated with the visual consistency from the first page to ten pages deep.

Just for good measure we even helped construct a cherry-picking functionality to enable news articles to sit at the top of section to promote popular or sponsored content.

Composable data structure

When it comes to building a publication, there's a lot of moving parts... When those moving parts are constantly shifting up and down through the ranks, joining teams, leaving teams and winning tours, it's a whole different ball game. We broke all of these people/bikes/teams up into small parts to allow hot-swapping of content at a granular level. This meant that once you've built an incredible profile on one of the top racers, it permeates through every page and every article with every update.

This flexibility enabled the editorial team to really delve into what was possible. Whether it was creating parent child relationships with teams, team members & bike brands, or specifying the flow when you're looking to promote articles - all of the individual atoms of the content structure communicated and relied on one another to create a web of content that enriched every piece of news.

Minutes matter

The ever shifting world of sports coverage requires instantaneous feedback, and real content velocity. If we miss milliseconds that could be disastorous for the reporters and sports fans alike. We ensured that every component, every page and every interaction was lightning fast, powered by the incredible infrastructure at Vercel. We ensured that no matter the number of users, we would always have uptime and an incredible set of components to match.

Speaking of components we helped to develop their Storybook environment, from a couple of components to every single component you see on the website. Each component stacked with props and adjustments to make sure it fits flush to the page along with tests to ensure the fallback works with whatever content you throw at it. Pretty nice right?

Here's to the team

We couldn't be happier with the Global Cycling Network team, and although it's obligatory for every agency to go ahead and claim they've built pretty much everything themselves, it really was the team effort that made the website what it is today.

We don't want to get too mushy, but every member really pulled their weight and pushed something incredible within a tight timeframe, from the project management to the dev squad, here's to the dream team... And the people that reviewed my PR's - cheers! 🎉