GT and Vital BMX recently partnered to help find grassroots riders for a new program called GT Project. It’s GT’s way of giving back to the community and allowing a handful of riders to get their hands on a limited-edition frame. To find the best riders, we launched a video contest open to riders around the world. Riders enter by uploading a video of themselves riding. Then the top 25 videos will be picked by the Vital community. Then GT will pick the Top 10 winners.

The response we’ve gotten so far has been great. Check out the contest page here.

Our users really seem to like the new forum platform we debuted last month. Overall traffic in our forums has doubled since the redesign, and the growth shows no sign of slowing down. Compared to many forums that are complicated and over-engineered, ours is simple and easy to use. We want our sites to be the place where the conversation happens, so forums are an important part of that.

One thing we get a lot of compliments about is that comments and forum posts from users on our sites are all linked to their profiles. Compared to sites with completely anonymous posts, this drastically reduces the base-level trash talking, and allows people to have more meaningful exchanges.

Lastly, we’re going to be integrating Motodrive.com at the end of this month, so that will be a huge boost for the Vital MX community.

Some companies just seem to get everything right. These ads from Apple are the best I’ve ever seen at coordinating two adjacent ad units into one ad message. The Mac/PC characters start into their usual routine, but get distracted by the banner headlines above (which appear to be coincidental at first). The inter-connection of the ad units, along with video, sound, and a clever story line is really effective. (I should know – I went to NYTimes.com for a news update and got completely sucked into the ad.)

Here’s an interesting argument on MediaPost against using click-through rate to measure the success of an online marketing campaign (“Please Stop Asking About Click Rates!”). It also has several suggestions for more effective metrics.

This is a funny excerpt:

In the offline world, how many times have you seen someone hop into a taxi cab as a result of seeing an ad on the cab, and ask to be driven to the store featured in that ad? This is the functional equivalent of tracking click-through rates — and if you look at it in those terms, it sounds a little silly.

Read the whole story here.

It’s only been eighteen months since our launch back in August of 2006, and we’ve already gone live with Vital 2.0. All three of our sites have a new look, improved navigation, and a custom-written backend system. Some of the highlights:

• A new homepage. Our users spend the majority of their time with us watching videos, so we put a video player right on the homepage. The homepage also has a more “modular” structure, with the latest updates from each part of the site automatically flowing into the various sections. Users can now see the latest news, features, forum posts, product reviews, etc. with just one scroll through the homepage.
• Members can comment on nearly everything on the site.
• Our new forum is a lot faster and more functional than the old one. Also, each thread has the profile image for each member who is participating in that discussion.
• The member profiles are much easier to modify.
• Better overall speed and performance.

The biggest improvement isn’t actually even visible. It’s the fact that we wrote the code for our system from scratch. Our old sites were built on several open-source systems that were cobbled together. The upside of this was that we were able to launch relatively quickly. The downside was that we were dealing with code that was written by thousands of volunteers, and trying to make it do things for which it was never intended. Aaron Chandler, our senior developer, spent six sleep-deprived months coding our new system in Ruby on Rails. The beauty of having our own platform is that future changes and additions will be faster and easier to develop (and we’ve got a whole list of ideas for 2008).

We had a feedback link on the sites so we could hear what our loyal users thought about version 2.0. Take a look at some of the comments (verbatim, of course):

I love it man, its an awesome new look and i think that its alot easier to surf around on the site. All the main things are on the main page great job

I like the new design, it is much more user-friendly and it allows for ease of use. WAY BETTER!

I really like the new layout of the website. The home page is a lot more organized and appealing. It makes it easier to get anywhere on the site. No complaints so far and I pretty much use this site everyday.

hey love the new look, looks great better than the old style u guys had but cool man and thanks for setting this site up lets bikers from everywhere hang out and check each others ride out. i just wanted to say thanks

thiss site has always been good and now its even better…this site is what makess me motivated to ridee!!!

Nooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!! Whatever happened to amazing homepage that i have grown used to viewing every morning of the week? I feel as if a childhood friend has left me abrubtly, Maybe, just maybe… I can deal with this tyranny.

I really like the new design. It is much easier to use rather than the old design. I supposed to be doing a school report right now, but I think this is much funner. Lol

Hey! Great re-design! Awesome! Congratulations!

much better, I like the “:05″ time back on the video player… nice one…

I like it. It suits me more. It seems up to date. Thank you for the new version of Vital Skate. You will make me feal alot better. Thank you once more.

Check out the new sites at VitalBMX.com, VitalSkate.com, and VitalMX.com.

Active is now the official sponsor of the Grill Session on Vital Skate. If you haven’t seen it before, the Grill Session is our recurring pro interview feature. All the questions are submitted by members of Vital Skate, so it’s a cool way for skaters to get to know their favorite pros a little better. The Grill Session has become Vital Skate’s most popular feature, so we’re stoked to have Active as a part of it. One unique aspect of this sponsorship is that links for the featured skaters’ sponsors will go directly to a “brand” page on Active’s website. This makes it that much easier for people to by the products their favorite pros endorse.

We’ve also created a Grill Session channel for the video player on the Vital Skate homepage, so now all the Grill Sessions are in one place. Check out the Karl Watson interview below, or on the site. Thanks, Active.

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