New Improved LetsRun.com: Share Your Feedback

wejo · 2013-11-12T15:49:31-05:00

We're proud to unveil a new improved LetsRun.com. A sleeker, responsive design of the homepage with a host of new content features on the backend. This is the official feedback thread. You can read more about the changes, tell us your opinion, and submit any glitches you see here: http://www.letsrun.com/2013/11/new-improved-letsrun-com/ This is a work in progress and this being LRC we'd love to hear from you so we can make it even better. We have more changes in store, and you'll see more and more content built out on our new backend. A big thanks to LRC visitor and web developer Erik Westlund for making this possible and to Steve Soprano, aka Employee 1.1. Post away in this thread or use the feedback form at the link above. You can also always email me at weldonjohnson@letsrun.com Thanks for the support of LRC over the years.

LRC Community/Where to Run/Race Reviews

Reply New New Thread

Moderation Moderation Information Moderation Information & Rules

Page 8 of 9

1 7 8 9

Next Last

12 years ago 11/14/2013 3:30am EST

re: Salt Lake City man

Hey LRCI agree pretty much with everything here. The new page is 'nicer' .. but it's not really anything worth the effort, imo. It's like you tried to rebuild it without actually changing it around much. Why not take the opportunity to, if you're gunna rebuild it, rebuild it? Rather than edit and tweak it, rebuild it. Make some real changes, and pick it up. I think it'sa) easierb) a better use of your timec) much more worthwhile then promoting the 'new site'; If you're going to put a shout out around the internet about your new site, and you're crazy not to, then make it worth the effort, and actually drum up some more readers. Instead, folks will drop by and hardly see the difference. And then you lose them. Other points* Really "Doping news" gets its own category in the drop down menu? how about letting that go? At least not make it a priority on the navigation, to makes you appear a little obsessed with it. It's not really a category or topic of running, is it?* Same goes for "bizarre". Hardly something worth sticking in the primary navigation. Why not better use your primary available navigation space for more compartmentalized sections: "distance" could be anything from an 800 to a marathon or beyond. Or "professional" is a huge category; how about men's or women's, or any number of other sub-categories that would seem more pertinent than 'bizarre' or 'doping news'.* Bizarre doesn't tell me anything at all. Make it clear where I'm going; that's why it's called a navigation bar.* the best looking part of the entire new front page is the footer .. it's new, it's fresh, it's well designed and appealing as well as functional. use that for your building block for the entire feel of the page, imo.* I do think the font on the main text sections should be larger. I'm not a big fan of either of the directed fonts, but if that's what you want to go with, make them bigger .. at least 2px larger (reading on a 21" screen)* You have no tag? A home page with no tag is odd. Images should have alt tags. A lot of the scripts should go in the footer, not the header.* I think meta description tags should still be used, not just a title tag.* The Quote of the Day, is cool, but it probably doesn't need to be the single leading feature on a home page. IMO, ymmv.* Why not put a link to your Facebook page on the site? That seems beyond a no-brainer to me. Or your twitter feed. And an RSS link?* Personalize your site. Improve the 'About' page, and update, or sharpen, your images there. Let your visitors know who you are; otherwise the entire thing is just zeros and ones.The main task ahead of you, imo, is the boards. Good luck with that; they have some great conversation, and some great info, and some complete a-holes who make the place a complete waste of time. And the design of the boards facilitates, even fosters, that.Cheers

Salt Lake City man wrote:
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.

12 years ago 11/14/2013 5:29am EST

re: erik

This year I replaced my Iphone 3GS (still works fine -- I gave it to my son) with a Samsung Galaxy S4.On my Samsung Galaxy S4, Chrome has an Accessibility setting "Text Scaling" where I can set a preferred minimum size for fonts.In the forum message boards, when reading threads, most of the messages have fonts that are initially scaled to my preferred size, while some do not. It seems that messages with paragraphs (long lines that wrap) are scaled, while messages with short lines that don't wrap are tiny.It's specific to Chrome -- the Samsung "Internet" application displays these messages fine.

erik wrote:
Alright, folks, some improvements:
...
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.

12 years ago 11/14/2013 7:24am EST

re: wtfunny

wtfunny wrote:
If you're going to put a shout out around the internet about your new site, and you're crazy not to, then make it worth the effort, and actually drum up some more readers. Instead, folks will drop by and hardly see the difference. And then you lose them.

I agree with this. I've (no joke!) been using this site since its inception, back in the days of the old Merv's forum and the like.

I come and go -- my interest ebbs and flows. If I saw this page and didn't know it was new, I wouldn't have noticed the difference.

This isn't meant to be a slam on what you've done, moving forward with a CMS and doing the hard work on the backend is totally worthwhile.

However, I think you need to engage with a designer and start thinking more about design aesthetic than just cramming as much text on a page as you can. I know there's a desire to put as much information on the front page as possible, but to a casual viewer it's just information overload. It's so hard to hone in on anything that you get frustrated and give up. I don't even use your main page, I come straight to the forums and look for news that way.

Think about cutting 90% of the text off that page and instead using it to engage users and draw them deeper into the site.

12 years ago 11/14/2013 9:40am EST

re: A Duck

A Duck wrote:
Salt Lake:
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 Duck -

I get this and apologize if my critique was harsh. But just because LR was born out of hobbyist roots doesn't mean it must suffer the same bad business decisions and lack of marketing sense that other hobbyist enterprises do. The site's traffic is growing, and the owners can grow smartly and significantly along with it.

12 years ago 11/14/2013 9:44am EST

re: wejo

Jumbled and slow to load - a vast improvement!

12 years ago 11/14/2013 9:48am EST

re: grapevines

Would be very happy with an Apple LR App

12 years ago 11/14/2013 9:56am EST

re: bluemt95

Didn't see any replies these questions. I like the cleaner front page look. And I like the fact that your are tagging and categories tons of content. But there is not way to search for those tags, or categories, except to the very top level through the "NEWS" menu. I think being able to drill down to several more sub levels would be useful.And there is no drill down menu to athlete pages that you mention. There is no way to search for "Category: Geoffrey Mutai", except by going to your article and clicking on the link you provide. This organization is useless unless you can search it via text field or drill down further in the menus to find what you want.

bluemt95 wrote:
I can't find any menu or link to athlete tagged pages, except the link you provided in the article.
In fact, where do you search for any tags? The search field in the upper right of the home page just yields hundreds of independent links or items. I'd rather if I search for "geoffrey mutai", that it would at least provide a search result to the "Tagged: Geoffrey Mutai" page or a link to the athlete page or something.

12 years ago 11/14/2013 10:36am EST

re: bluemt95

bluemt95 wrote:
Didn't see any replies these questions. I like the cleaner front page look. And I like the fact that your are tagging and categories tons of content. But there is not way to search for those tags, or categories, except to the very top level through the "NEWS" menu. I think being able to drill down to several more sub levels would be useful.
And there is no drill down menu to athlete pages that you mention. There is no way to search for "Category: Geoffrey Mutai", except by going to your article and clicking on the link you provide.
This organization is useless unless you can search it via text field or drill down further in the menus to find what you want.

We are working on improving the search to be smarter about using tags and categories (right now it searches the title and content of articles/links, and prioritizes title matches). There are cheap and easy ways to do search tags and categories but I'm hesitant to implement them without a lot of testing. We have over 1200 original articles and thousands upon thousands upon thousands of links, each with numerous tags and categories (we actually have over 69,000 separate links stored in our database we hope to get indexed, rojo is motivated to do that). Indexing a database that large for search through WordPress requires some care. For the time we're being cautious to make sure things are stable.

The special content pages now are limited to events. We'll be adding a lot of other types later.

The menu is also a work in progress -- we want it to help people around the site so they spend time there so your feedback will be helpful.

I increased the font size on articles by a couple pixels and jumped up the front page font size another pixel. That should help allay some people's concerns over the font.

The good news is a lot of people's requests are on our to do list. Keep 'em coming.

12 years ago 11/14/2013 10:42am EST

re: Ole Timer

Ole Timer wrote:However, I think you need to engage with a designer and start thinking more about design aesthetic than just cramming as much text on a page as you can. I know there's a desire to put as much information on the front page as possible, but to a casual viewer it's just information overload. It's so hard to hone in on anything that you get frustrated and give up. I don't even use your main page, I come straight to the forums and look for news that way.
Think about cutting 90% of the text off that page and instead using it to engage users and draw them deeper into the site.

Dumbing down LetsRun by removing 90% of the content from the front page would be a big mistake. I can see myself making a mental note of a story link only to come back and never find it again. I predict threads on the message board asking "what is the link to story X?".

LetsRun is actually less cluttered and cleaner than other news sites like CNN.com, FoxNews.com, DrudgeReport.com.

What you are proposing is a design like RunnersWorld.com which forces the reader to search and click around to find any real content. I don't want to work that hard.

12 years ago 11/14/2013 10:50am EST

re: webfoot

About that iPhone or mobile header with the three lines:

You don't need a "home" button. Everyone knows from using amazon that clicking the logo ("LR") will bring you back to the home page.

I have an iPhone 5 and it's "ok" with three lines but on a 4 or 4s, the header wastes as much as 1/3 of the screen. This is really bad practise. Look around, there is a reason everyone else fits this into one line.

12 years ago 11/14/2013 12:50pm EST

re: wejo

Here is a little review sort of article. Doesn't cover everything though:

http://athleticsillustrated.com/editorial/lets-runs-website-renovation/

12 years ago 11/14/2013 1:06pm EST

re: wtfunny

http://imgur.com/bcwjWrf

The content is just barely larger that the recent stories and hey don't fit. Using chrome on windows 7

12 years ago 11/14/2013 1:15pm EST

re: Centro Fanboy

Centro Fanboy wrote:
http://imgur.com/bcwjWrf
The content is just barely larger that the recent stories and hey don't fit. Using chrome on windows 7

Fixed. Thanks.

12 years ago 11/14/2013 1:33pm EST

re: wejo

Rotatable for touchscreened Android/iPhone/WinExcrement/MacIntosh.

12 years ago 11/14/2013 1:35pm EST

re: wejo

Just wanted to say that it was my first time posting on LetsRun.com yesterday and I'm really glad I did. Also enjoy reading the daily quotes and news. Cheers.

12 years ago 11/14/2013 5:25pm EST

re: wejo

I really, really like when you scroll down on the front page, the top banner stays frozen so you've always go the option to hit the boards or jump to another news story quickly. It's a very welcomed improvement. The overall style is a lot cleaner too. Great job!

12 years ago 11/14/2013 6:24pm EST

re: Sloop John B

why isn't anything spelled wrong?

the only error I could find was in

"The stadium where Michael Johnson won gold medals in the 100 and 200 and 400 at the 1996 Games could be knocked down"

With a line drawn through the "100 and" part. At least someone didn't think of just deleting it. But that doesn't make up for the lack of misspelled words. Now it looks all fancy and high-brow.

12 years ago 11/14/2013 8:19pm EST

re: wineturtle

wineturtle wrote:
I think it is a great logo.

Your name fits you!

12 years ago 11/14/2013 8:26pm EST

re: wejo

Some things obviously haven't changed with a new format:

'We also want to thank you, our loyal visitors. Thanks for all the support over the years and thanks for helping us improve our new design. Little LRC has over one million monthly unique visitors thanks you.'

'...thanks you.' 'thanks to you'?

12 years ago 11/14/2013 8:41pm EST

re: RuKiddingMe!!

RuKiddingMe!! wrote:
you do a great overall job Wejo, and thanks for some help in the pass....BUT
Letsrun should have regular College Thread on the front page (the columns black letters - Example Olympic info)
-Ever year college information is minimize? Why?
-the season is all most over yet very little coverage?
-surely there are a lot of great inside stories out there?
-you do a poor job of promoting college running, especially XC! why?
-yet you go out of your way to make sure the Kenyans get their promotions, in side stories, individual analysis....sometimes I think all you care about are foreign athletics especially when good American stories are passed over...why?
Anyway...I Love this site!...overall I get you an A minus!
and thank you for "week that was" and running nerk like me loves it!
GO USA!
BTW: I am not hating on the kenyans/Africans....but let them do a little of their own Journalism.
PS...you like to see spelling check here, and grammar check, hell we ALL need it!

Why? Because Kenyans are the best runners in the world right now....This is one of the most ridiculous posts I've seen in awhile, and not representative about what most people think on letsrun. Keep it up brojos, we need to know the Kenyan guys more than our failing one guy under 2:10 this year American guys.

Page 8 of 9

1 7 8 9

Next Last

What People Are Talking About On LetsRun

No top threads at the moment. Check back soon.

Reply Replying to

Username

Password

Leave the password field blank to post anonymously.

Post Preview

By posting you acknowledge that you have read and abide by our Terms and Conditions.

Remember me on this device.

New Improved LetsRun.com: Share Your Feedback

This thread has already been deleted.

You have been subscribed.

New Improved LetsRun.com: Share Your Feedback

Jump To A Page

Follow wtfunny

Block wtfunny

Follow ukathleticscoach

Block ukathleticscoach

Follow PJW

Block PJW

Follow bluemt95

Block bluemt95

Follow erik

Block erik

Follow webfoot

Block webfoot

Follow Athleticsillustrated

Block Athleticsillustrated

Follow erik

Block erik

Follow Sloop John B

Block Sloop John B

Follow Bad Wigins

Block Bad Wigins

Jump To A Page

This thread has already been deleted.

Reply Replying to

You have been subscribed.