Fit For Life What is it?  Fit For Life is a basketball day camp organized by the Los Angeles Lakers to promote fitness, nutrition, and mental health in downtown Anaheim, California. This past weeks participants were from Mark Twain Elementary and Hill Classic Middle School. At both locations some members of the team, Pau Gasol, Luke Walton, Sasha Vujacic, Jordan Farmar, Trevor Ariza, Josh Powell, and the Laker Girl Team spoke about their personal diets and exercise routines to emphasize their importance. Later, the students and players participated in some basketball drills and pick-up games. What does their website exceed at? The Fit For Life site has a variety of great programs running that really draw a reader (scanner) in. As discussed before in class, a website builder's information should always be contained in the visible part of the page so the scanner must not scroll down. With their abundance of pictures, they have a program that takes the space of one picture but rotates from a variety of pictures to show them all in one space. I have noticed this program before on the Stanford Athletics site but after seeing it again on a philanthropic site, I realized it would be great to implement it into my site. In addition to the rotating pictures, the site also contains video clips of the players and students in action. This program seems like it conveys the mood and atmosphere of the camp very well to observers and gives the camp a little more tangibility. With this form of viewership, the camp appears to be more legitimate. I do not believe I (or any other member of the staff) have filmed any of the camp over the past several years; however, in the upcoming camp, I should most definitely film the students and coaches working together and post my recordings to this site. As the Lakers are apart of such a large organization (at least compared to my one-man show) they have a multitude of resources to draw upon which lets them show a much wider venue. I really like the fact that they have links from their pages on fitness to their own pages on education. These links are also let them learn very distinct tools such as photography, math, reading, and United States History. All these tools that I would like to offer to the students of my camp are slightly unappeasable to my capabilities currently, but will hopefully so be implemented. What can this site improve upon? Some of the material on this site is not very suitable for scanning. They often have long and lengthy paragraphs that could be shortened down to be made more concise. They have great mission statements and depictions of the programs they have, but if I was not in a class where I was instructed to analyze a page, I think I would have skipped over these readings. As I mentioned previously, I really enjoyed the rotating pictures; however, I did not like the rotating sub-pages in picture form. It created some difficulty in selecting the page I wanted and did not let me have complete control over the site as I would have wanted. Overall, this was a very well run site and I will hopefully be able to impalement many of its tactics without seeing some of the downfalls I saw with their site. Garrett Delgado June 6, 2009 | Westcoast Sports Associates  What is it? The Westcoast Sports Associates are a group of individuals, including Roy Firestone, that raises money year after year for programs that they start up or programs that they want to succeed better or at a faster rate. This group is not necessarily a competitor of mine, but rather one of many judges that will determine how well of a job I am doing in the creation of my site and camp in general. This group would be one of my target viewerships, donors. The year I pitched the idea of my camp to their board they were willing to fund my camp with a donation of one thousand dollars that was greatly appreciated. This organization goes through this process of deciding who is worthy every week by allocating their money to different organizations What does their website exceed at? The Westcoast Sports Associates do a great job at writing for the personas of either someone willing to donate or a philanthropist looking for money to build or help facilitate their project. The language is slightly more sophisticated and technical than most speak, probably because of the higher intellect of those approaching this site. In addition, as a art of the Southern California style, everything is a little more matter-of-fact and to the point. With the exception of the material on the home page, everything is extremely well directed to following pages that will need a little closer attention. One program that I really like from this page is the director in the top right hand corner. When the cursor travels over the image, it lights up and obviously when clicked upon will take you to that section of the site. I have seen this on other sites and think that it is a great idea to have links imbedded in images, rather than words (not saying that one is better than the other, but saying that diversity may be better than just one technique). Simplicity is also greatly appreciated on this website. It is not cluttered with too many programs and is not cluttered with ads that may discredit the site's integrity as a true philanthropic organization (ads may give vibes of profit maximization, which maybe should not be sought by philanthropists). What can this site improve upon? The way that this site gives its information is pretty easily scannable. It could use more navigations away from its home page to make it even more accessible. For instance, the home page is slightly cluttered with the accomplishments of years past which could easily be moved to another page for a better viewing quality; unless they feel this information is completely vital to being the first thing that the viewer sees. In this case, they could do a little more highlighting to put more emphasis on the aspects of their accomplishments. As mentioned in the Laker's site, a video or series of videos would be great to add to show the actual affects of the money donated. People like to see a finished product from their money, so why not give them the best medium for their generous donation. But overall this site is very professional. |