On behalf of Athletics Exclusive, we would like to wish the Australian athletics community all the best on the New Year. As well as thank you all for your support over 2014!

With well over 7,000 connections on our social media sites, we have well and truly cemented our place within the Athletics Community in this Country.

Our biggest part of the year was the month of the World Junior Championships, followed by the Commonwealth Games. With these events being in completely different times zones from Australia, our team worked all hours of the morning and night to make sure that we provided the best coverage possible – which we think we did! We would like to thank all the members of the World Junior Team as well, for their compliance in answering questions for us. It was a big month in preparation, and an even bigger month when the competition came around.

What we achieved

• Website Design – We believed that we had quite a good design at the beginning of the year, but we still wanted to give the site a fresh new look. This current design has a great focus on images, which we love for this type of site.
• Contribute – Although we haven’t put a large emphasis on this feature yet, we changed the ability for users to post articles to the site. No longer do our contributors need to log into the ‘backend’ of our site, they are able to post articles and blogs, right from the main section. This feature was implemented because of the complexity of the administrator section of Athletics Exclusive. Not only did we do that, but we also added the opportunity for people to write news articles as well!
• the Call Room – The Call Room is a new forum that we have only just added. Since Athletics Exclusive started, we have struggled with getting our community coming back to the site. Being mainly a news site, once an article has been read, there is no incentive for people to keep coming back and checking in. The Call Room is one of our solutions to this problem, as it provides a place for our community to come together and discuss all things athletics with like minded people.

What’s coming in 2015

• Athlete Profiles – We dabbled in this a little bit in 2014, but have found a better way to create athlete profiles. Starting with the athletes who compete in the Athletics Australia Tour meet, we will create profiles for each athlete with information on them.
• Product Reviews – We are looking at starting to review different products that Track and Field athletes use. This should give our community some insights into different products that they may be considering purchasing.
• Shop – To align with our Product Reviews, we are exploring the option of adding a shop to Athletics Exclusive. Stay tuned for more details.
• International – We are opening our doors to international members. More to come.

We look forward to continuing to provide our community with the latest news and information for athletics in Australia!

Thanks

Lachlan Rayner
Athletics Exclusive Founder