For well over a decade, Believe in the Run (BITR) has been the go-to source for runners looking for reviews of the best new shoes and gear. In recent years, the BITR team has continued to up its game and expand its repertoire to include videos, podcasts, community events, and tons more.

In 2023, they were ready to take the step up from running shoe review blog to a full-fledged media company. The problem was that their old site just couldn’t keep up. It was finally time for a site that was as ambitious as the team itself.

We’ve followed BITR for years, read countless reviews, and spent way too much money on running shoes. This was one of those projects where we were the exact target audience. At the same time, we always try to go outside of our own experiences to think about what other users may want or need.

Our vision was to create an experience that pushed Believe in the Run into the next tier of competition with national and worldwide endurance media outlets. At the same time, so much of what people love about BITR is the authenticity and personality that comes through in every piece of content. It was important to us to upgrade the editorial design without losing that critical personal touch.

Beyond redesigning all of the core content to fit our goals, we always want to bring something special to a project. For BITR, we really focused on new features that would serve new runners while also bringing in some fun for the more experienced ones.

Have you ever read a review or watched a YouTube video and thought to yourself halfway through, “I have no idea what this person is talking about?” Yeah, same here. If you’re not a runner or shoe geek, you may not know that there are lots of technical aspects that make up a shoe and give it its particular look, feel, and performance. The goal of Anatomy of a Shoe was to visually break down these terms and make them easy to understand and digest for runners of all levels.

At any given time, there are thousands of shoes on the market. How can we help people quickly understand what shoes will fit their needs and preferences? Enter Shoe Finder. By answering a few questions, we created a tool to direct runners to a few shoes they may want to get to know better. In addition to providing this useful tool to our readers, we also helped drive more traffic to lots of great reviews that people may not have seen before.

It wouldn’t be a BITR site without a little bit of controversy-bait (all in good fun, of course). This is where the rubber hits the road (bad pun intended). For this feature, we set out to answer a pressing question – What shoes and brands does the BITR team love most right this minute? Expectedly, this has generated lots of fun conversations and debates, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

If their track record is any indication, the Believe in the Run team won’t be slowing down any time soon. We’ve already been working with them on a new set of features and ideas to continue evolving the site and serving its readers. If you’re looking for your next pair of running shoes or just in search of a few laughs, now you know where to go.