Based on my eternal dissatisfaction with FitDay I did some research today for fitness sites. I found a lot of really, really bad ones. Many seem to be little besides a bunch of ads surrounding access to standard nutritional data and the ability to add numbers from that data together. Way to go!
I found a very nice review of "Web 2.0" fitness sites and based on that gave SparkPeople a whirl. So far it is leaps and bounds better than FitDay and looks to have what I need. I have two big complaints with it:
- Their ads and ad placement is even more annoying that FitDay. I'm generally okay with it since it means I get to use the site for free, but they're making me scroll to get to the actual value of the page and that's very annoying.
- It is hard to get started on the site if you don't want to go through their entire intro process. I wanted to start counting calories, entering in food, and go. I couldn't do that, and they got in my way at every turn until I set up a 'plan' and gave the value they see themselves as having lip service. Once that was done I could pretty easily get to the 'my Nutrition' section and add foods. After that point we're golden, but getting there was annoying.
- Okay, I'll throw in a bonus complaint: my Nutrition? I guess since my domain name is a joke making fun of that naming pattern I may not be objective here, but that was old a year after Windows XP was out, maybe sooner.
It also feels like people are actually working on SparkPeople, and I get no such feeling whatsoever from FitDay. It is at least good enough to make me switch, and based on the reviews it may be one of the best out there in the space.
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