The newest version of DeepFitness is almost ready for release. This will be the 3rd vision of our fitness/nutrition web site. Version 1 was modeled after the content based INeedCoffee and the directory based ASPIN. Because fitness/nutrition is such a wider topic than coffee, the site was a lot of work to maintain and our audience was scattered. Our pages on womens health and martial arts were the most popular.
In version 2 we decided to go ugly. Drudge ugly. Make the site more like a tabloid. Get more people to the site and then they’ll read the articles and click the Google Ads. Traffic did go way up, however the users didn’t stick around in the numbers we’d hoped for. Ultimately we dropped the tabloid and outside links and focused on articles. The traffic dropped, but the ad revenue went up.
Our 3rd change of focus left us with an ugly interface and messy data model. The site is both financially successful and yet embarrassing. This past month I’ve been cleaning up the database and designing a new interface. There is still quite a bit of work to do on the back-end, but we are within days of deploying the new version.
UPDATE (11/6): I deployed the new site.
*There is a plan to make the 800+ articles XHTML compliant in the next few months.
