Bookies

The push for a Bookies.com redesign came from senior management, who saw the need for a brand refresh alongside a technical migration. The old site ran on legacy tech, and moving to WordPress was the main driver for better performance.

Beyond the platform change, the goal was to make the brand lighter and easier to digest, and to give the homepage more to say than plain text. We aimed to surface a bit of everything the product offered, rather than leaving visitors to dig for it.

The old homepage was built almost entirely around SEO copy: long blocks of text with little for a visitor to actually look at or act on. The brand direction I was given was simple and modern, and I carried that through a new typography system, logo update, and refreshed colour palette.

Rather than leading with text, the new homepage surfaced previews of the latest articles and latest picks, giving visitors something to scan and click into rather than read through. Each preview carried an exit link out to the relevant sportsbook, keeping the conversion path visible without it being the only thing on the page.

The WordPress migration ran mostly independent of these decisions, with one exception: comment sections were dropped from the first iteration, a scope reduction rather than a design constraint.

I stayed in close contact with the SEO and content team throughout, making sure their needs were reflected in the design rather than working around them. SEO content still had a place on the homepage, just no longer as the dominant element.

The main constraint came up building the navigation: the tools available limited what we could do, and I had to adjust the flow slightly to work within them. It's a limitation that remains unresolved today.

Bookies.com's redesign is live today, running on the new brand system and WordPress platform. Performance improved throughout, and we were able to pull live data feeds into team pages and other sections that previously relied on static content. The SEO team continues to manage ongoing content population on the homepage, and in practice it doesn't always render or perform as well as the original design intended.