Relaunching Peak Performance

In the January / February 2007 issue of InCirculation, I wrote about Web 2.0 and how publishers need to embrace the new internet. Old skool websites were like newspapers: a one-way experience where publishers offered up information for visitors to consume. The new net offers us fresh opportunities – and expectations. Community, user generated content, audio, video, interactivity. Web users expect this stuff now, and I wrote that we publishers need to find ways to deliver.

As I was writing these words, I was aware that the largest website I manage, Peak Performance Online (www.pponline.co.uk), was still distinctly 1.0. How embarrassing! Like a cheating cabinet minister espousing family values, I felt a bit hypocritical.

But my team and I had plans, and as I write this, PP Online is about to relaunch as a shiny new site. And as you read this – and I’ve got my fingers crossed here, which makes typing a tad tricky – it should be out there, reborn and revamped.

Here’s why we did it, how we did it and what we hope will happen next.

If it ain’t broke, why fix it?

PP Online was launched in 1998 as the website of the niche sports science newsletter, Peak Performance, a sinewy document, as we say in our marketing, aimed at elite athletes and coaches. After a false start, the big thinkers behind the site – Sylvester Stein and Mark Nunney – came up with a model based on search engine optimisation and direct marketing principles.

Unlike many publishers who are afraid to make their content freely available, for fear of devaluing it, we put the entire archive of PP – bar the few most recent issues - on the site for anyone to read. When visitors arrived, they were greeted by pop-ups and bright banners encouraging them to sign up for a free weekly newsletter full of training tips. These email leads were then sent regular messages encouraging them to subscribe to the print publication.

It worked. Traffic to the site grew to its current level of 400,000 unique visitors a month, thanks to the great, keyword-rich content. Leads poured in and through clever emarketing, highly optimised contextual advertising and the development of new products, we built PP Online into a very profitable business.

Five years after creating this model, it had barely changed, and the traffic and leads were still flocking in. It would have been easy for us to rest on our laurels.

But we’re far too restless for that - and laurels aren’t that comfortable anyway. Looking at our visitor stats, I could see that the majority of visitors were coming in, taking a look at our very technical sports science articles and leaving rapidly. And content was only growing as quickly as our newsletter publishing schedule. I also had lots of ideas about stranded marketing that our site couldn’t handle.

It was time to rebuild.

In with the new

The plan was to create a site that built on the success we’d already had, rather than tearing it down and starting again (that would have been stupid). We still wanted to keep lots of free content. In fact, ditching the content that brings us so much traffic would have been more than stupid; it would have been bonkers. The site architecture had to remain similar too. And the main drive of the site – to convert visitors to leads – wouldn’t change, although we want to sell more books and subscriptions directly off the page.

The aims of the relaunch were as follows:

* Move away from reliance on text, as users demand more: video, audio, tools.
* Create a strong community site with stickiness – a ‘Facebook for sportspeople’ – with interwoven stranded marketing.
* Allow users to generate their own content.
* Use new ways of creating bespoke reports and marketing.
* Make the site more advertiser friendly (in other words, better-designed).
* Move away from a reliance on pop-ups towards getting more valuable registered users.
* Shift balance of sales away from emarketing towards on-site.

Above and beyond all this came a genuine desire to provide a truly excellent and useful site for athletes and coaches, a place for sports enthusiasts – the kind who live to win medals and improve their personal best – to get training tips, ask questions and share expertise. We wanted to create a site that we could be proud of.

R before D

Research and planning came before development. The first step was to write a wish-list of features. What would make a truly compelling site? What kind of content would our visitors find useful?

It was a no-brainer that we would retain the archive of articles, and keep adding to it. Blogs were also something we had tried before, as they help provide a constant stream of new content. Good bloggers provide compelling content that brings people back. We decided that we would open up the blogging facility to anyone and allow them to write about their sporting achievements and opinions.

It seemed pretty obvious that we should add videos too. The exercises and training routines described in our articles translate well to video, and I know from my own rather confused routines at the gym that there’s a demand for seeing how exercises and workouts should be performed. Video is expensive though, to produce and host, but we tackled the first problem by finding keen members of our existing community who were willing and able to produce high quality clips, and found a cheap hosting solution. The site, when launched, will allow anyone to upload videos, although in the interests of quality control – and to avoid any, ahem, inappropriate content being uploaded – we will vet everything before publishing it.

The next idea was to add an Answers section, where athletes and coaches could exchange knowledge. A leaderboard will encourage people to share their expertise. I have high hopes for this part of the site as I believe we’re providing a really useful facility which should build into a huge knowledge-base.

Finally, we wanted all our members to be able to have their own homepage and the ability to add ‘buddies’ and network with one another. They would also be able to join and create groups. Rather like Facebook, members could leave messages for one another. The best part, though, is that when members join up, they will be asked to tell us their sporting interests so we can serve up useful content: recommended questions, videos, articles, etc.

The developing world

After that, I sat down with my talented development team who told me what could and couldn’t be done. They told me all my ideas were ‘easy’ – as developers usually do! – so the next stage was to write a full spec.

The first step was to mock up a design, with the aim of producing a clean and attractive site which would appeal to visitors and allow us to combine the various features that I’ve outlined above. Our designer, Janak Singh, created the mock-ups in Photoshop. These were scribbled on and rejigged before being passed to the head developer, Nick Thompson, who coded them into reality.

As a non-techie, projects like this appear to move slowly in the initial stages, because most of the work is in the back-end, like laying the foundations of a house. Only later do you have anything to look at and show people; and it’s at that point that you think of 100 new ideas that should have been included in the original spec! The best thing to do at this point is to only keep the essential ideas – those that will be harmful if they are omitted – and put the rest back to post-go-live.

My advice to anyone carrying out a similar project is to try to think of every potential pitfall and problem, how everything connects, how it would work both for users and at the back end. Then expect to uncover a hundred more when you’re halfway through and the deadline is looming… I’ve spent the last four months making decisions about every tiny detail, involving five-hour meetings about navigation and lots of post-it notes stuck on sheets of A3 paper which the developers and designer turn into webpages: rather like watching stickman sketches turn into animated movies.

The site was developed using the Drupal open-source content management system. The beauty of this system, and the design we’ve gone with, is that it’s flexible so we can test and change things post-launch. User behaviour is not easy to predict, even if you think you’ve thought of everything. Only when people start using it will we see what truly works and what doesn’t. I’m bracing myself for a steep learning curve.

As I write, we’re in the final stages of development, and it still looks a bit like a Rolf Harris painting – not very easy to see what it is yet – or a magic eye painting which will suddenly spring into focus. As content is added and I start playing with the site, I’m driving the developers mad by finding little bugs and things that ‘aren’t quite right’. But it’s so exciting, and I’m convinced that all the time and effort that my team have put in will be worth it, and we’ll have a site we can be very proud of.

Our mission is to be the world’s most useful information source and vibrant community for athletes. Only time will tell if we achieve that goal, but please take a look at the new site at www.pponline.co.uk and let me know what you think.