The Sacramento Mile is an iconic AMA Grand National Championship motorcycle race which was first held in 1959. There were issues with the longtime race promoter and it appeared that the race wouldn’t run in 2014. At the last minute AMA Motorcycle Hall of Famer Steve McLaughlin stepped in as promoter.
Desmo Studio was contacted by Mr. McLaughlin in May 2014. There were 10 weeks to race day, and there was no domain, no website, no social media, no way to sell tickets. It was much like our experience in motorsports – it wouldn’t be possible without Steve assembling a group of professionals (and enthusiasts) to get it done.
Leveraging our 14 years of working in Professional Motorsports and 28 years of IT we quickly researched domains, available social media usernames, and made a plan.
We selected a domain based on keyword analysis of past Sacramento Mile media coverage, setup branded social media, and a custom responsive WordPress theme that maintains the upgrade path. Site performance was optimized using W3 Total Cache, with images and other static content pushed to a Content Delivery Network on Amazon S3. The site was integrated with Google Analytics and security locked down with Wordfence. We also engaged a small Google PPC campaign to drive targeted traffic while the site indexed, and gained traction.
It was P1 organically before race day, and by all accounts the race was a barn-burner. You can watch the 2014 Sacramento Mile here.