Active.com is a San Diego based online community for people who are passionate about team sports, health & fitness, and other recreational activities. Active.com serves as a portal to connect athletes to like-minded athletes, sports, training programs, tips and nutrition.
Since its first site launch in 1999, Active.com hasn’t been through as many redesigns as I would have expected – the first design for Active.com was launched in 2000 and was kept until 2001 and then Active posted a change in 2002 through 2007. For five years Active.com kept the same static, 3-bubbled homepage design. In summer of 2007 they launched a newly designed look (beta) so let’s see how the redesign pans out…
Overall the brand is very powerful. Active.com is headquartered here in San Diego and has been a major sponsor and participant with local and national sporting events. People all over the U.S. easily recognize and associate the Active brand with sport activities – especially marathons.
Messaging: When I come to the homepage I know that Active.com is for the passionate runner, team sports enthusiast, and fitness coach. The site is very much geared towards community building techniques like videos, coaching, lessons, and team sporting events. But what exactly does Active.com do? That question is not immediately answered after visiting the homepage.The only thing I would suggest is to include a tagline in the header that directly states what the brand is all about. What is Active.com here to help people with? What’s in it for the user to participate in this community?
“Active.com is the leading online community for people who want to discover, learn about, share, register for and ultimately participate in activities about which they are passionate.â€
To find out what Active is all about you have to go all the way to the bottom of the page and click on About Active.com to see what they do. I would like to see that one-liner in the header as a shortened tag line. Bring more punch to the messaging!
Engagement Value: When I first jumped onto the site I wasn’t too sure where to begin. There’s a rotating box at the top with featured marathon outcomes, weigh loss tips, and soccer practice group info. But what do I click on first…? The engagement on the homepage is so weak that I’m lost and unmotivated to do anything there. There are tons of easy (and fun) ways to make this page more engaging – spice up the homepage with colors, include BIG buttons for conversion points such as newsletter and RSS sign ups, include the ability to actually play a video on the homepage (not shoot me off to another page), or include newly posted blogs on the upper fold.
The Active Endurance entity has the idea of organization and engagement down. They use brightly colored buttons as a way to flow the visitor through the site in an organized fashion. There are also prominent ways for a user to convert via the Contact Us, Request a Quote, and Request More Info. These are types of simple, yet important features I would suggest Active.com implement.
Fun: Right away the site doesn’t look fun. Honestly. The static nature of the site dulls down what the intensity and fun could potentially be. Including bigger pictures, colored buttons and text, a countdown for the next marathon or winner of the last tri are all ways to create a fun atmosphere. Think of the energy and intensity of the 35,000 runners the morning of the San Diego Rock ‘n Roll Marathon – that’s the level of fun Active needs throughout the entirety of the site.Right now the community feature is beneath the fold so it is easy to miss to the first time visitor. I suggest throwing that up above the fold so it’s easier to find and will add some “fun” to the site. 
Quality of Material: That’s the great thing about Active.com, the material is very informative and maintains a high level of quality. So props to Active!
Style: The style is ok. Actually, I don’t feel like there is even that much style. It’s just a white background with no obvious navigation, no focus areas, and no personality. I would say the current site isn’t styled – it’s just a sheet of white resting on a bed of code…waiting for a designer to spruce it up.
2 Brand Strategy Recommendations
- Include a one-liner message in the header as a shortened tag line
- Spice up the homepage with personality by adding some color, include buttons for easy user flow & conversion points such as newsletter and RSS sign ups, split up the sections with background colors
Overall, the social aspects of Active.com are pretty good even though there aren’t many social bookmarking or viral components available for the community to run with. Here is my review of the social side of Active…
Viral Components: The social bookmarking components available Ie: digg, stumble, send to friend, etc. are not very prominent on the article pages. Even to a power user, like myself, it was hard to figure out what all of these buttons mean. I would suggest making them a bit more obvious to the user:
What do each of these mean? Also use different colors to make them stand out. There’s a rating system for users to rate the blogs but I’m not sure how many people would even notice it since it’s at the bottom corner of the post. There is a commenting system on the blogs – but there is no conversation on these posts. I don’t even see where the option is to leave a comment on these posts. I looked at each post and there is no “leave a comment†button. This could be a reason why there is no activity on these posts. Do I have to create an account to comment on a blog? If that’s the case, users shouldn’t have to jump that hurdle just to post comments on a blog. Open up the community so you can begin to generate some conversation on these posts.
I will say Active has included some key aspects on the blogs like tagging, RSS, and commenting as well as a community push and other sharing features – but the current elements just aren’t cutting it.
Community: At first glance it looks like there is a large community centered on the Active.com network. I browsed the community of people in My Active and saw there were over 32,000 pages of user profiles on the site – holy crap! That’s a good amount of users. But then I did a little digging and noticed that most of these users aren’t doing anything on the site. Even the profile (bigapplepie) who has the top rated ‘Status Level’ profile in the community hasn’t updated his profile in over 4 months and hasn’t contributed any personal blogs, videos or saved any stuff to share with the community. Fraudulent! There is potential for genuine and massive community involvement but right now it’s just an online ghost town.
Other Social Features: Something that I noticed was the ‘Top Members’ list on the Blogs and Threads page. I am a true advocate for giving users the power to gloat as a top member when they are an extremely active participant in the community. If a member is going to blog, comment, share stories, and post info to the community then I’m all about giving them top member status in a list format. Why not? So great job on that Active!
Another social feature I noticed was the ‘Pulse Check’ poll on the homepage. I think it’s a great idea to get your community’s opinion but I tested it out and noticed that there’s no limit as to how many times I can vote. Talk about skewed results! What I would suggest is placing a cookie onto each user’s browser so they may only vote once per poll. Also, I would suggest replacing the poll at least once a month to keep it somewhat engaging.
3 Social Media Recommendations:
- Add in viral components for videos and blogs like digg, stumbleupon, reddit, del.icio.us, and facebook
- Include text or button under each post “leave a comment†– make it obvious
- Fix the poll to allow users only to vote once
Web Standards:It looks like they tried to use some modern coding techniques, but didn’t follow through all the way. There are a ton of in-line CSS style definitions that really should be in an external file. They have made good use of lists for navigation and a fairly consistent code structure. Advertiser technology causes some pop-up blockers to initiate – baaaad.
Friendly URLs people, this is 2008, not 1995 – no page URL should ever look like this:
http://search.active.com/?categoryid=Activities&i=1&mediatype=Tournament&saved_q=&sort1=none&u1=categoryid&u2=mediatype
It should look like this (everything else should be in a session cookie):
http://search.active.com/Activities/Tournament
XML/RSS Feeds: None on the homepage 
Sad. There are RSS feeds for the community and forum updates but nothing is prominent on the homepage to let people know they have the option to subscribe to updates on the site. Make the RSS feeds prominent so that people know they are available to them.
Analytics: Yes. Active is using HBX from Visual Sciences. This is a great way to keep track of who your visitors are, where they’re coming from, what pages they access the most, how long they’re staying on the site, where the drop off pages are and what conversion points are failing or thriving.
SEO: Active.com has title tags but no description or keyword tags on the homepage. I took a look at a few internal pages as well and it seems like they’re using title/meta data for internal pages.
Browser Compatibility: Firefox, IE, No Mobile
Site Search: Active offers on-site search which is pretty comprehensive. I searched, for example, “San Diego marathon” and was able to sort the results by relevancy, name and date. Search is relational, this is good. It isn’t just a direct query for titles. No results found page offers possible other suggestions, but the results are a little strange.I searched for “spellunking” and it didn’t even come up with “spelunking” as a possible alternative term. Instead I got “spellbinding, speaking, spending” – wtf? If you’re going to have this feature in here (which I recommend you do) make the thing work right or don’t do it at all.
4 Technology Recommendations:
- Correct errors listed on XHTML and CSS errors (W3schools & W3C are great resources for proper code standards)
- Include meta data for the homepage and any interior pages that are missing them
- Implement RSS feeds on the homepage that users can subscribe to for website/community/forum updates
- Add mobile capabilities so people can access event info, updates, games, etc. via mobile
Design: The main issue I see with the visual design is lack of contrast with graphics on the page, but at the same time, too much contrast in text areas. For the contrast on the pages, it would be helpful to differentiate sections with subtle background colors. This will help the page to not feel like one huge flat wall of text. And for the text itself, small color shifts could go a long way.The site is large and rich with information. All this text on each page can make it hard on the eyes. While reading articles I find myself squinting to help my eyes focus on one line of text. I suggest changing the text color to a deep gray rather than full on black and increasing the line height on full article pages.
Navigation: Interaction within the Community module on the home page is confusing. The four links on the left Discussions, Blogs, Tags and People should all trigger the same behavior because they look the same and are stacked to the left of preview content. The gray area forms a tab around the left-side link and relates the content to the right of it to that section. When I click the next link Blogs, it’s now got the gray background and I can clearly see that the content on the right is now related to Blogs. This is a nice way for users to preview content without leaving this page. When I click the next link Tags, I expect the same interaction, but to my surprise I’m taken to a whole new section of the website.Sometimes the logo is linked to the Active.com homepage and sometimes it isn’t. I was exploring in the ad center and wanted to go back to the homepage. Wait – how do I get back to the homepage? The logo isn’t linked…one of my biggest website pet peeves!
Sitemap: Active has a site map which is great for both visitors and search engines. It isn’t clear if they have an XML site map which is usually submitted to Google Webmasters and can also offer additional valuable information.
Features: There are a lot of different features on the homepage – I am a little bit confused when I get to the site because nothing stands out to me and says “Click me, Click me! Go here.†Like stated above, some small color shifts between text and different sections would make features stand out more.
User Interaction: Super freaking busy site. TONS of navigation presented to the user all at once. It’s a little overwhelming. Here are a few things I noticed:
- I don’t like this automatic swapping back and forth between tabs on the home page (weekend planner, healthy lifestyles, and activities & events tabs). Its distracting and annoying when you’re about to click on something and it swaps to the other tab on you. Not to mention that it isn’t a consistent height across all tabs and shifts the entire center column.
- Articles have lots of share options, they’re using Add This for their social network sharing – good mashup.
- The image ads are targeted pretty well, however the sponsored advertisement text links make no sense at all – Villanova Project Management? What does this have to do with sports? Credit Score, credit cards, and online MBAs? That’s a real stretch.
- The navigation is very inconsistent across all the sections and makes tunneling around the site confusing at times.
5 Functionality Recommendations:
- Prominently show the user what to do on the homepage (newsletter, rss feed sign up, commenting)
- Create highly visible buttons and points on the site that assists in user flow
- Change the text color to a deep gray rather than full on black and increase the line height on full article pages
- For the contrast on the pages differentiate sections with subtle background colors
- Make sure to maintain high relevancy for all ads on the site
- Make sure the logo is always linked to the Active.com homepage
Brand Strategy – 3 Stars
Social – 3 Stars
Technology- 3 Stars
Functionality – 3 Stars
Overall the site has a lot of potential. For the amount of content and variety of athletes the site caters to I am actually pretty impressed with the overall organization and cleanliness of the site. However I would still tackle some of the recommendations given above in each of the categories since there are areas that need tinkering.
I would focus a lot on the community and viral aspects of the site because the network is so massive there is a definite potential for this community to grow exponentially. Remember to include viral components on the site so that the community can spread blogs, videos and polls as they please.
I would also focus on creating the personality of the site to match that of Active’s user base. Focus on the fun and excitement that sports and fitness training brings to people’s lives! Integrating some mild color changes in the text, color contrasts between sections and larger images will bring Active.com to the level their passionate athletes truly deserve!