It's alive!

jspitzberg — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 21:46:27 GMT

As you may have seen on the way here, we've redesigned... "refreshed" in the parlance... our home page. If not, do check it out. We'll wait.

So? What do you think? For us it is hopefully a big improvement in that it will get you the user to where you want to be on Active.com quicker. Now there's a lot to that statement, so let's unpack it a little.

First of all, the page should load faster. We've done a lot of fun things to the code and creation of the page. We've done everything we can to streamlined our HTML, stylesheets, and javascript code. One fun new approach for us was using CSS Sprites to reduce the number of images we load on the page. In all, we've cut about 30% off our file size and our load time; and we're not going to stop there.

As for the layout of the page - we've replaced the duplicate left navigation menu with an expanded global navigation across the top of the page. We also removed the tabbed content from the page because it hid more than it helped to display.

The page now has a nice focus on what our tag line says - and please forgive me if this crosses (or has crossed) the line into cliche - "your guide to an active planet". We've got lots of content, clearly displayed, to help you become a better, stronger, healthier runner, softball player, yogi, whatever. We've got videos, message boards, and blogs where you can share stories or ask and answer questions. And we're giving the core of our site (It's all about the Core) - our directory of events, races, classes, campgrounds, tournaments, etc - the prominence it deserves.

Again, all this should help you find what you want on Active.com quicker and easier. The organization of the page, the colors, the speed in which the page gets to you... it's all done for this same reason.

Of course, we could always use your help to make it better. We can look at all the stats, and we all have our own opinions too. But how are you finding the site?

Thanks, and now get out there and participate!

Jeremy Spitzberg

Codehisattva

It's all about the Core

JeremyGThomas — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 22:20:19 GMT

On the Product Development side here at Active we haven't done a great job of communicating with our audience. We're hoping to change that now.

I'm a Development Manager with the Participants side of the Active Media Properties (AMP), the team responsible for www.active.com, results.active.com and community.active.com (we also have a few services/widgets we develop and support behind the scenes). We are distributed, with some people working from China, others in Michigan and even others in LA. But the bulk of us work out of the San Diego office.

I worked for a long while as a Management Consultant implementing waterfall-based projects with various Fortune 1000 companies. Consulting companies love waterfall. Changes in scope = more dollars in the pocket. But I've always been troubled by the inefficiencies that are inherent to waterfall and to the disconnectedness it brings to the parties involved in delivering a project. So I was keen to implement Agile software development with my team here. Agile is hard with remote resources I quickly discovered. But I digress.

But then came our "Directory Initiative". In simple terms, we use the word "Directory" to describe search.active.com and the mechanism through which we submit information to it. Active is a network (my company is actually called "The Active Network"), and we are a conglomerate having acquired multiple companies throughout the years. Each of these companies have interesting artifacts (or "nouns"), such as classes, campgrounds, marathons, training plans etc., and search.active.com aggregates these making them discoverable to our consumers.

Directory is the core of what we do here within AMP. And we've recently launched a major program, the "Directory Initiative", to enhance and harden those features on our properties that are related to it. To do this we've split the team into smaller teams and have aligned each with a Product Manager. Although we've only just begun, organizing our resources in this way has already paid off (at least with internal demos). So, while we may not be fully Agile, the hybrid model we've adopted is promising.

More to come.

Blog Posts From Active Product Development Tagged With directory

It's alive!

It's all about the Core