New Improved LetsRun.com: Share Your Feedback

Love. it.

I use Chrome and the font on the front page is almost unreadable. Maybe it's something with my machine, but I don't use the front page much anyway so who cares.

It looks like most other wordpress sites. You need a UI guy to spend some time with it and brand it better. Shrug.

RuKiddingMe!! wrote:-you do a poor job of promoting college running, especially XC! why?

Can't say I remotely agree with anything you wrote, but let me help you out on the college thing

wejo wrote:

Post away in this thread or use the feedback form at the link above.

I've had a day with the "new" site to gather pros and cons:

Pros

- Now responsive. Critical for ANY site. My sites are no longer "also good on mobile" but are instead mobile-first. Our sites officially passed the 50% mobile/desktop threshold a few months and that ratio will continue to grow.

- CMS. Looks like you're powered by Wordpress now, and that's a no-brainer. Benefits of a CMS with the best open source community around.

Cons

- You did nothing to attract new users. You may have appeased the existing community, but the site homepage is still a jumbled mess of words with weak categorization . Categories should be visually linked in a way newish running fans can comprehend: Pro racing news, College racing news, Training Info, Off-LR News, etc.

- Zero dynamic added to the homepage. Do you not seeing scrolling dynamic leads, carousels and sliders across every other content site on the web? Do you think we run those just for kicks? Reconstructing the homepage exactly as it was is one of the poorest decisions I can think of. At least enlarge your lead story thumbnails for some visual interest.

- Zero brand improvement. In the hands of a capable designer, you could have delivered a refashioned logo that kept the feel of your silly nostalgic joke of a logo in place (reminds me of Mountain Bike Action) but brought it to a place of quality. But you instructed your guy to just reset it, and it shows. Amateur typographic work and poor branding vision that will continue to turn younger users away.

- Almost zero ad revenue improvement. You're in this to make money right? Or at least have it not be a labor of love? Why do you continue to use the third rail for content and not for widgets and ads? Where is the leaderboard? The page-bottom leaderboard? Advertorial spots in the content well? Mind you I'm not even suggesting interstitials, video interstitals and other intrusive ad spots that annoy users, but simply monetizing the page that people are on. Pay an ad sales consultant $400 for a report on what your audience analytics can generate.

I hope you're just getting started here, because the changes are so under-the-hood that it seems silly to market it a "new and improved LR." I know I had the opportunity to help and passed on it, but I also know you can do more. Good luck, guys.

jamin wrote:

Congrats on the new layout, Weldon. The old one was so 1995, but with the remodel you've definitely made it into 1998. Right now I'm browsing on Netscape Navigator from my iMac G3. If you want me to report some bugs, you can add me to your AOL buddy list. My screen name is PaintballDude69.

exactly what i was thinking.

The improvements are very nice. Good job.

One suggestion:

It's hard to scroll through videos on the right side because the scroll bar is so compressed.

Well, that same logo is still on the page. Change that antiquated, hideous, looks-like-an-elementary-art-project logo and I might consider the page improved.

I'll chime in on the advertising.

We have all of the same ad units we had before but the leaderboard is in a better position. That's a revenue improvement and a design improvement.

The mobile friendly site looks better for advertisers as well. Another design and revenue improvement.

Perhaps you saw the site today when a few ads were turned off, but the leaderboard on the homepage is very prominent atop the center of the page under the nav bar. Before it was in the upper right.

There is an ad in the 3rd rail.

We have content in the 3rd rail because first and foremost we are a news site. Our visitors keep coming back because of the news.

We're not done yet. The front page design improvements were actually not the primary focus of what we set out to do. However, it's a much better looking site so we were glad to get it live.

Renewed Marathoner wrote:

The improvements are very nice. Good job.

One suggestion:

It's hard to scroll through videos on the right side because the scroll bar is so compressed.

I'm not sure what you are talking about. Can you tell me your browser and screen width?

We're still working out a few kinks on various browser widths.

Everybody should be working fine on IE now.

I have to admit, I like it. Much, much better than healthcare.gov!

United Care Cross Vision wrote:

Well, that same logo is still on the page. Change that antiquated, hideous, looks-like-an-elementary-art-project logo and I might consider the page improved.

I think it is a great logo.

hi, I was on firefox with a 15" screen. I hope thats what you were asking.

ill try to elaborate more.

first, this isnt a new problem, just figured id mention it now.

I dont see any arrows to click to scroll through the video choices slowly. so I hav to either click the scroll thumb and try to drag it ever so slightly or just try to click right below the thumb.

hope this helps.

also want to say thanks for being so responsive, just tell the damn scrollbar to stop being so haha.

cheers

erik wrote:

subelitist wrote:

What's your 5k pr, Erik? My judgment of the new stuff depends on that.

16:23. I'm the slowest runner on staff, but I think I might be able to beat rojo right now.

QOTD

Alright, folks, some improvements:

As you know, no more IE issues. There was a bug with the javascript that loads the ads that was causing the issues for IE users. So that's fixed. Sorry to the shirkers stuck with crappy work computers that still have super old IE versions who couldn't read LRC for 3 hours. It looks like we're fully compatible back to IE9. Lower IEs still work but there's still some CSS issues being caused by lack of CSS3 support. But it's workable.

I thought I was clever making the view width 1024px because it looked good on tablets (namely, iPads). The latest browser versions finally got rid of vertical scroll bars actually taking up viewport space and float them when scrolling. But a fair amount of people still use old browsers that don't do that, and that caused horizontal scrolling, so that's fixed on the desktop. iPads still look good.

I made the "Home" link on mobile say "LetsRun.com" which some people requested.

By the way, on Androids/Chrome you can now request desktop version on mobile and it will work. Soon we'll add a feature to make that stick without requesting it. I might also add a feature to allow people to change the font and font size but that's not the highest priority right now. Most people really like the new font, but a few vocal people have found it hard to read. So we're listening.

I know there are some weird floating issues on some of the event pages on older browsers, which I'll address next.

For the curious I'm keeping a little blog on what we're doing:

http://devblog.letsrun.com/

. The technical minded people may be interested in what I post there. I might write some about the decisions we made on certain design/development aspects and why and people can give feedback.

So far the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from people, so thanks. Not everyone's happy about everything, but it's hard to know who to choose to please when half the critics say "I hate mobile sites!" and the other half says "it's not mobile-responsive enough!" But we're gonna try to please as many people as we can. Although I'm pretty sure we could give every LRCer 100 bucks and a few people would complain we didn't give 200. We'll still try to give you 200.

Looks ugly, not as much in view on the page with the bigger spaces. go back! invest in an editor instead.

You promised we could keep our old plan.

Slow Bro wrote:

Please, please, PLEASE STOP with the auto-play video. I don't mind if an ad plays, but I'm sick of the same video automatically loading and sucking up bandwidth every time I open a thread.

Let the ad play, then let the video come up as an OPTION, not an AUTOPLAY.

You mean seeing Rod Dixon win the 1983 New York City Marathon isn't as entertaining the 100th time?

Salt Lake:

Good comments and observations.

It would be interesting to see what an up to the moment approach could bring -- without -- as you say the stuff that irritates users/readers.

You have to remember that this site was born out of "something to do with the down time between runs."

It had a hobbyist beginning, and they've never had the motivation to maximize the sites branding or value.

A really nice improvement. Groovy. I can dig It. I suggest that you have total resolution pictures minus the graphic as we download today from paparazzi galleries.