A Kicker of a Website for The Natural Selection Tour
The X Games and the Olympics can step aside, because as any die-hard snowboard fan will tell you, the real snowboard contest is The Natural Selection Tour. This multi-week, international competition brings the world’s best snowboarders together to compete on our planet’s most challenging natural(ly enhanced) terrain. Naturally, they needed a world-class website to function as a hub for the events, and 14Four was stoked to oblige.
Challenge
The website needed to serve several different functions, while also being scalable. Firstly, it had to support multiple live events with seamless streaming and interactive capabilities so that fans could cheer on their favorite athletes. Visitors also needed to be able to buy merchandise off the site, as well as discover NFTs. Finally, the site needed to be built in a way that it would be easy to pivot to hosting mountain biking in the summer season.
Solution
We were lucky to be able to work with one of our favorite partners – THIS Design – out of Portland, OR. Having worked together on plenty of other projects, jumping into UX was the easy part. We settled on clean animation to allow the content to stand out.
Because the website would work as a living, breathing reflection of the competition, we needed to hone in on scalability and flexibility. What might need to change as the contest progresses? How could we make on-the-fly updates as results came in? We settled on a headless CMS to allow for easy changes and installed third party applications to incorporate streaming, up-to-date results, and more. Then we got to testing. And testing. And testing.
Impact
Having worked out any kinks during our testing stage, we were confident we were launching a banger of a website… Which was just as well, because the site experienced an avalanche of viewers during the tour. Thousands of users from across the world tuned in to watch, and sales of merchandise and NFTs were at an all-time high. From live streams, to event countdowns, to notifications, we’re proud to say the Natural Selection Tour website runs as smooth as the buttery tricks the riders threw down.
Compete on our planet’s most challenging natural(ly enhanced) terrain.
Fender
3D Animation