Our redesigned registration page is now live across BikeReg, RunReg, SkiReg, and TriReg. To celebrate the launch, we hosted a webinar with a walkthrough from the team who built it and a conversation with Reuben Kline, who has been producing gran fondos since 2012 and puts on the USA Cycling Gran Fondo National Championships.
The throughline: your event page is the one place every single participant lands. That makes it one of the best marketing tools you have, and the new design is built to help you tell your story and get more people to sign up.
It Started With Your Feedback
This project began with surveys from event directors and participants.
“We fuel our vision based on your input. That is our North Star.” – Evan Huff
That feedback came down to six themes:
- Help me find events
- Make key details easy to find (cost, location, date)
- Keep it simple, with easier navigation and less scrolling
- Make it more mobile friendly
- Let me tell my story with photos, videos, and social links
- Notify me when events are opening
Before designing anything, the team audited every use case on the platform, including edge cases that might only show up in 10 transactions out of a million. They also rebuilt the technical foundation, so the team can act on your feedback faster going forward.
The result: pages load 30% faster, with 67% less navigation complexity on mobile (three menus down to one) and 31% less scrolling to reach key event info.
Five Principles Behind the Design
What makes athleteReg stand out isn’t just the platform, it’s the level of service behind it. Our customer success team is upbeat, proactive, knowledgeable, and deeply invested in helping events succeed. We wanted the registration page to reflect that same standard of service, with the right details at the right time.
That shaped five design principles:
- Start with the participant’s goal
- Make complexity feel simple
- Build confidence through consistency
- Support every step
- Let the event tell the story
“We want to make it easier for participants to find what they need and register with confidence, while giving you the flexibility to tell your event story.” – Kristin Beadle
What’s New, Top to Bottom
- Navigation and search: Search results now show the event title, date, and location. Signing in is a tap away, with a toggle between participant and event director.
- Hero: Logo, date, and title sit together up top, plus a new event type badge (mountain bike, road, gravel) so participants know what they’re looking at. Participants can share by link, email, X, or Facebook, and Instagram has been added to your social links.
- Overview: Contact and location info moved from the bottom of the page into the main flow. We’ve added an optional countdown timer, description, participant count, and participants can contact you without leaving the page. Who’s registered, race predictor, and sanctioning permit IDs live here too.
- Message center: One consistent spot for alerts like registration closed or scheduled and block pricing. It only shows up when you have something to say.
- Choose your options: Expand and collapse registration table by group, add optional descriptions, and see status at a glance in a new column (closed, spots remaining, waitlist). Same complexity, much easier to scan.
- Merchandise and donations: A new card layout with two product images, low-stock badges, a detail view, and pre-filled donation amounts. Participants get a confirmation when an item is added.
- Selections: A summary of everything in the cart before checkout.
- Maps: A dedicated section supporting Trailforks, MapMy, image maps, and Ride with GPS. On the event director side, you’ll get a recommendation on the best map type for your route.
- Event details: Organized into Planning and Event Day, with sections like lodging, parking, and packet pickup. Event directors can use preset content blocks or create their own.
- Highlights: A gallery of up to 15 photos (five shown on the page) and up to three full-width YouTube videos, with more as thumbnails.
- Results: A sortable table of past results to build credibility.
- More from this director: Now four event cards, with Register and See event buttons.
Coming soon: a new sponsor section to showcase your partners, and a Notify me feature that alerts participants when registration is about to open.
Built to Scale With Your Event
You don’t need to use every section. A simpler setup with a hero image, your options, a map, and a handful of photos still looks polished, gives participants everything they need, and tells your story.
“It gives you the flexibility to create a rich event or keep it more focused without it ever feeling like it’s unfinished.” – Kristin Beadle
Believe in the Bike
Reuben Kline founded the Gran Fondo National Series in 2012. He came up through mountain biking, working in a bike shop in 1991, and put on his first event, the Gran Fondo National Championships, in Frederick, Maryland. The next year he added five more. Today he produces the USA Cycling Gran Fondo National Championships.
His slogan is simple. Believe in the bike. He built his events to share cycling with as many people as possible, which is why he’s always used BikeReg. It’s been his best connection to the riders he wants to reach.
With events spread from Asheville to the North Georgia mountains to Florida, the route is the story. Offering 30, 60, and 100 mile options signals that his events are accessible and inclusive. But he’s also clear-eyed about the business side.
“We’re all in business of putting on events, and somehow or another, they gotta be sustainable.” – Reuben Kline
As one of the early users of the registration page redesign, Reuben called out the map embed and the new event overview layout as game changers for getting route and logistics info in front of riders. And the community keeps coming back. At his most recent event, Gran Fondo Maryland & Gran Fondo National Championships, at least a half dozen riders had been with him since that first event in 2012.
Key Takeaway
The foundation is the same for every event. What you put into it is what makes your page stand out.
- Add a hero image and event description
- Upload photos and videos to Highlights, with a short description for each (it helps with search, too)
- Add a dedicated map for your route
- Organize event details into Planning and Event Day
- Set up merchandise and donations with suggested amounts
Need a starting point? Check out Your Event Page Setup Checklist. And if anything comes up, our support team is a phone call or email away. Reach out at support@athletereg.com or call 888.956.9560.
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