Case Study 03

Building Trailbound's Website from the Ground Up

Trailbound had a game and a growing Discord community, but no real website to anchor the brand or bring in players from search. I planned and led a brand-new site: clear information architecture, search-oriented content, and messaging that introduces the game fast.

Company: Trailbound Role: Website & content strategy Focus: New build & discoverability

Business Need

The brand needed a real website — not just a Discord presence.

Trailbound lived mostly on Discord, with no dedicated site to introduce the game, hold its story, or get discovered in search. The build started from a blank page: define the information architecture, decide what each page had to do, and write content that both reads well and matches how players actually search. The goal was a site visitors could understand fast and search engines could interpret clearly.

Illustration of a golden trail winding through a dense forest — the new site's lead hero visual — Lead hero visual for the new site — a clear path through dense forest, echoing the Trailbound name.

My Role

Connected SEO logic with content and website structure.

What I owned

Website content direction, structural recommendations, search-oriented prioritization, and the customer-facing logic of the site experience.

Who I worked with

Stakeholders responsible for the brand, website implementation, and the product story the business needed to communicate more clearly.

What sat under my remit

Content hierarchy, navigation logic, page emphasis, search discoverability priorities, and the clarity of market-facing messaging.

What I Built

Built the site around clarity and discoverability.

Structure / System

Designed the site architecture

Set page emphasis, hierarchy, and content grouping from a blank page, so users and search engines had a clear view of what mattered.

Campaign / Channel Design

Built content paths for discoverability

Structured content around real search behaviour and audience intent from the start, rather than defaulting to a flat, unprioritised site.

Brand / GTM

Set the market-facing story

Wrote messaging so the new website introduces the game clearly and supports downstream conversion.

Key Challenges

Search performance depends on more than keywords.

Market / brand challenge

The new site had to communicate value clearly while aligning with how target players searched for and evaluated games.

Cross-functional challenge

Building a site spans messaging, design, and implementation, so the plan had to be practical and adoptable by the people shipping it.

Execution constraint

With limited time, the site had to launch as a focused, well-structured first version rather than a sprawling build with unclear payoff.

Impact

A stronger foundation for search and conversion.

Improved discoverability foundation

Clearer page hierarchy

Messaging

Sharper value communication

Business

Stronger commercial readiness

Discoverability was intentional from day one

The website was built around the topics, structure, and content logic most likely to support search visibility over time.

The brand story got cleaner

Users could understand the offer more quickly because the website did less competing and more prioritizing.

It proves market-facing restructuring ability

This project shows I can improve performance by reworking the customer-facing system, not only the campaign layer around it.

The New Site

What the build produced.

Two browser windows showing the new Trailbound site — a hero-led homepage and a readable content page — Design direction for the new site — a hero-led homepage and readable content pages built around a clear hierarchy.

Site-tree diagram showing top-level pages resolving into a prioritised hierarchy, with primary paths highlighted in gold — Information architecture for the new site — top-level pages resolved into a clear, prioritised hierarchy, with primary paths highlighted.

On the numbers

This study focuses on the build and its craft. Search and traffic results will be added here once there's a clean analytics window to report from.

Takeaway

This project demonstrates digital performance thinking: using website structure, messaging, and SEO logic together to create a stronger customer-facing system.

Next case study Get in touch