Myswimming.org

Myswimming.org

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Whether you want to brush up on your stroke, find a career in aquatics, or learn about elite sports stars, training and coaching, swimming.org is a one-stop aquatics resource. Its vast content spans 40,000 pages and includes news, video, image galleries, microsites and award-winning web apps, such as British Gas Swimfit. With users ranging from coaches to "swim mums", every visitor is looking for something different. But with such a range of content on offer, this can sometimes take time.

Skylab always likes to keep an eye on the future and think of ways to evolve our clients" sites. In this case, we wanted to simplify the user experience by enabling quicker, easier access to areas of interest on the site.

We came up with the perfect solution Myswimming.org. This innovative personalised dashboard pulls content from across the swimming.org site into a live "river of news", which users can customise according to their interests. Stories, images and videos appear in the feed as they are posted on the site, meaning the content really does "come to you".

Customised content

All swimming.org visitors are invited to set up a profile and build their own personalised world of swimming. Users can select exactly which content they want to subscribe to from a long list of "interests". So, if you"re only interested in water polo, you can choose to receive water polo updates and strictly nothing else. Content in the river of news can also be filtered at the click of a button, as each "interest" has its own clickable icon down the left hand side of the page.

Exclusive updates

A notifications system allows British Swimming to send short messages directly to users. These alerts sit in an eye-catching bar at the top of the river of news; users can also access notifications across the site via the global header. As a result, Myswimming.org users hear important updates, such as ticket and event information, much faster than everyone else.

Time-saving widgets

Logging in to Myswimming.org also unlocks other great resources such as MySwimfit. A handy Swimfit widget sits to the right of the river of news, providing at a glance progress updates and a convenient link to log swims and sessions. More widgets will be added to the site very soon, so keep an eye out for new arrivals.

Barry Wade, Web Manager, British Swimming, comments, "Myswimming.org is a huge step forwards for our organisation. It allows our users to take control and receive the content they are looking for, eliminating the need to trawl the site looking for topics of interest. It also helps us see which parts of the site are most popular, helping us monitor what people are interested in and deliver more of the same. 10% of users have already signed up and we expect to receive an influx of new members in the build up to the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Thanks to Skylab for coming up with this great idea, which has really gone down well with our users."

Myswimming.org is live now. To set up your own personalised world of swimming, visit swimming.org/myswimming. We'd love to hear your thoughts and welcome you to reach out and get in touch, we're on Twitter @studioskylab