Year in Review: Growth and Innovation on Singletracks in 2014

A couple weeks ago Greg shared a list of the most popular articles published by Singletracks in 2014, and today I want to talk about some of the other things that happened on Singletracks this year.

A big part of Singletracks.com is our massive user-generated mountain bike trail database, and in 2014 we saw trail page views jump 70% compared to 2013! The number of trail reviews was up more than 60% and we tripled the number of new maps added in 2014. Not only that, you helped us add about 2,200 new mountain bike trails around the world to the database.

In May we redesigned the trail pages on Singletracks for the first time in at least 2 or 3 years and the feedback has been great. We even snuck in a few new features that we haven’t had a chance to publicize yet:

Open edits: Anyone can submit changes to trail information.
Trail conditions: Added local precipitation amounts for previous 3 days plus 2 day forecast (US only). Judge how wet the trail might be based on how much rain has fallen recently.
Geo-tagged photos: We had been collecting lat/lon information for photos posted to trail pages but recently added photo pins to trailhead maps.
Instagram photos: Snap a photo of a trail and tag it “mtb” and we’ll automatically display the photo on the appropriate trail page when we don’t have a user-submitted photo of the trail.

City and state pages have been redesigned as well with a larger map and improved functionality. While we were at it, we also redesigned our gear review pages and added a comparison shopping feature to help you find the lowest prices on MTB gear.

Within the Singletracks app we added elevation profiles to maps (both online and offline) and improved the mobile blog experience. Our latest release should also bring things up to date for the newest phones and improve stability.

Looking forward to 2015

It’s been fun looking back on 2014 but we’re even more stoked about what we have planned for 2015! There are a couple new features lurking on the site already in “soft launch” mode, and we’re excited to make official announcements about these items next year. Our editorial calendar is stacked and we have plans to expand our team early next year… but again, you’ll have to wait for 2015 to get the official deets. 🙂 Finally, more design tweaks are coming to further improve usability.

Thanks to everyone who read an article, posted a review, or recommended Singletracks to a friend this year. We couldn’t have done it without you!