planetFear is a worldwide community of people who share a passion for adventure sports. The site was originally founded back in 2001, to fund the growing mass of climbing content. The planetFear shop was later launched and began to grow steadily. The site won a series of awards including Best B2C Website but since then ceasing trading in Winter 2007.

Following the purchase of planetFear by existing MTC Media client Ultimate Outdoors Ltd, MTC Media were delighted to be selected to deliver the new improved version of the website. The editors of the site are climbers, expedition racers, mountaineers, mountain bikers, backcountry skiers, and wilderness explorers – producing a host of top quality editorial and media content on a regular basis from across the globe.

Therefore the brief for the new website was both vast, and complex having to cater for a host of different media types such as text, images, and video. The site is rich in these content types, and would have to deliver them in a digestible format to its loyal readership. Not only that, the brief included a Content Management System (CMS) with multilevel access allowing editors with different access permissions to access the site and post content on-location, from around the world.

The site also features new improved eCommerce online shopping facilities, integrated into Ultimate Outdoors existing EPOS infrastructure. The existing membership of planetFear was retained, allowing loyal users to login to their account as normal, but with access to a host of new features including myplanetFear.

Through myplanetFear users can customise their content to suit their preferences. Through the channel based nature of the web site, climbing enthusiasts for example can choose to see only articles, news and photos relating to climbing. Users can also further customise the site, choosing images they wish to see as part of the “look and feel” of the site as they browse. This, along with the integration with popular social networking sites such as Facebook, Stumbleupon, and Digg means not only can users access the vast information available, they can personalise the site to suit them. Here is what David Pickford, Editor-in-chief of planetFear had to say:

"'MTC Media have completely revitalised planetfear.com with a host of visually stunning and intuitively-generated design features. Following ongoing discussion with the site's owners, MTC have consistently acted on various recommendations, to produce a new online interface that powerfully reflects the status of planetfear.com as 'the leading adventure sports resource'. I cannot recommend the services of MTC Media more highly."

David Pickford, editor-in-chief, planetfear.com

We recommend you pay a visit to the site, to view the features described above – as well as uncovering a few of the nice additional touches it includes.