The Austadiums website continues its growth, and a milestone was recently hit with the 550th venue added to the stadium database.
Here’s the latest update on what’s been happening on Austadiums and as always, there’s plenty to share. In fact, it’s been a year since the last update – how time flies when in lockdown!
Firstly, we recently added the 550th stadium to our database – the Sydney International Speedway which is nearing completion in the Sydney’s west, and the first world-class speedway built in Australia since the Perth Motorplex in 2000. Other venues added recently include Ballarat City Oval and Brisbane Lions’ Brighton Homes Arena at Springfield. Additionally, there are 25 proposed/rejected stadiums listed, including a number a venues to be constructed for the Brisbane 2032 Olympics, such as the inner-CBD Brisbane Live Arena.
Speaking of the successful Brisbane Olympics bid, the big news created a significant spike in traffic on Austadiums, with the Brisbane 2032 Olympic venues announced article racing to become the most read article on the site ever. In fact, the article has now had twice as many views as the next most popular article. A strong focus on SEO optimisation and integration to Google News has helped on this front.
This week, we launched an AMP version for news articles. What is AMP? An open-source HTML framework originally created by Google, optimised for mobile web browsing, and intended to load pages faster. Open an Austadiums news article from Google on your mobile, it’ll load instantly, without delay. It’s also another SEO improvement to improve Austadiums’ already-strong search presence.
There have been a raft of enhancements and new features since our last update, and we’ll highlight a few here. There’s new filtering options for events: by location on sports and comps events pages; and by sport on stadium events pages. City pages allow you to view stadiums and events within a particular city and we highlight five major cities on the homepage for easy access. There have also been a heap of UX improvements across the site to improve the design and experience.
A couple of features that have been up for a while now, but we absolutely love, is the nearby stadiums page, which displays the venues closest to your current location, how far they are from you, and one touch to get directions (easy access to this feature via the nav when viewing the site on mobile). Another is the stadiums map page which displays every venue in the Austadiums database on a map, as well as the new events map, showing where events are on today.
The Austadiums sports database remains the most comprehensive available – with every significant event in Australia listed since 2003. As of today, there are now 21,581 events listed, with a total attendance of more than 312 million. A new crowds page is under development and will be launched soon, making more attendance data available, and we’re excited for the imminent launch of the Stadium Supplier Directory – expressions of interest are open for companies wanting to get involved (great to see many already apply).
While the various lockdowns throughout Australia have impacted traffic at times due to less people attending stadiums, overall, it has remained strong, especially through a boost in news content and events held in different markets, with traffic set to bounce back as soon as Australia’s two largest cities re-open.
As always, we’d love to hear your feedback – tell us what you love, hate or would like to see in the future – contact the Austadiums team here.