Welcome Back: Website, Pitt blog promote healthy lifestyles for New Year

Students who resolved to live a healthier lifestyle this new year can begin their search for wellness online.

Active Pittsburgh, a website that catalogues local opportunities to engage in sports and recreation, and the Pitt Department of Intramurals and Recreation’s wellness blog seek to provide users with opportunities to stay fit. Active Pittsburgh caters to the entire city while the Pitt’s Recreation Wellness Blog focuses on Pitt students.

Jason Miller, the assistant director of Pitt’s Department of Intramurals and Recreation, created Active Pittsburgh in his spare time. The website lists events, activities and promotions that users can utilize to stay active in the Pittsburgh area. The site includes a blog with stories that highlight fitness accomplishments in the Pittsburgh community.

According to Miller, he began his online project in October 2012 as an Excel spreadsheet comprised of fitness organizations and events that he gathered. He later transitioned the information into an elementary website with only a list of links. Over the last year, he developed the site into a colorful webpage featuring the slogan, “connecting you to all things active,” and launched Active Pittsburgh as a business in November 2013.

“We’re essentially a brand-new business, but the idea took that long to develop into something,” Miller said.

Active Pittsburgh’s basic services are all free. Users can list organizations, events and promotions without paying a fee, and no membership is required to view these postings. The website charges organizations for premium listings on its activities directory, page sponsorship, advertising and promotional packages that are catered to each organization.

“I want it to be something that the masses can use. That’s the difference between our site and others. Some sites are kind of exclusive, where almost all of their services you have to pay for,” Miller said. 

Miller enlisted help from Michele Ingari, who was working for WebpageFX in Carlisle, Pa. Ingari is now the marketing director and online outreach specialist for Active Pittsburgh while freelancing her services to other businesses, as well. A team of interns also assisted Miller to transform the website into its current form. 

Miller said the site currently lists about 1,200 organizations and receives about 100 individual visitors to the site daily, which amounts to several thousand views when that user explores several different pages of the site.

“By our standards, it has grown, because when I first started it, I was excited to see that five people came to the site,” Miller said.

Miller said his goal for Active Pittsburgh is for the site to become the known resource for anything active in Pittsburgh. 

“We’re not there yet, but I think that as more and more people discover the site, they realize that it really is a comprehensive one-stop shop for that kind of thing,” he said. 

Ingari, who became involved with Active Pittsburgh in September 2013, has increased traffic to the site through search engine optimization, which makes the site more accessible to search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, and therefore more accessible to users. 

Miller said that he has also participated in outreach on Facebook and Twitter to direct people to the site. Active Pittsburgh has more than 500 likes on Facebook and more than 1,200 followers on Twitter. 

His team of about six interns includes students interested in both writing and marketing. Active Pittsburgh interns are compensated with academic credit. 

“Because we’re a true startup, they get to be involved in the whole process of developing a business,” Miller said. 

Kayla Keddal, a senior majoring in English writing and communications, has been a writing intern at Active Pittsburgh since March. She creates feature articles for the site’s blog. 

“We try to get stories about unsung heroes and people that overcome something. They’re doing something active or they have an inspirational story behind what they do,” Keddal said. 

For example, the blog featured a story about a man who rode a certain rollercoaster 90 times. 

She said that she hoped to gain experience at Active Pittsburgh for a future career in journalism and she received a writing job at a magazine because of an article she wrote for the site. 

Miller said that users looking to get back into the healthy habit can look to Active Pittsburgh’s winter activity guide for inspiration.

“Simply just getting connected to our site might give them that spark to explore some different things and become active,” he said. 

Pitt alumni Alex Cappola is the division manager of Pittsburgh’s branch of Major League Bocce, a recreational bocce league that began in February. Major League Bocce began in Washington, D.C., in 2004 and has since expanded to other cities. Members form teams to play bocce and then socialize afterward at a sponsored bar. 

Cappola said that Miller reached out to him on Twitter about listing on Active Pittsburgh. Major League Bocce is now listed on the site along with three other bocce leagues.

“I think it motivates people by showing them all the great opportunities that are out there that they might not know about without Active Pittsburgh,” Cappola said.

Pitt Intramurals and Recreation’s wellness blog also seeks to provide students with fitness opportunities.

Ayana Elmore, a senior English Writing major and a student employee in the Department of Intramurals and Recreation at Pitt, launched the department’s blog last November and is currently gathering content and student contributors. She began working on the blog in September after she pitched the idea to department leaders and learned that the department’s employees had already intended on starting a blog.

“It was kind of a mutual goal of ours, I found,” she said.

The blog will feature stories about students who are living healthy lifestyles, including a community collaboration board where students can share their health goals and accomplishments and showcase intramural and recreation events and organizations at Pitt.

Elmore said that the blog is a tool to encourage overall wellness, not just physical activity, and aid in overall awareness of the Department of Intramurals and Recreation. She wants to shed light on some opportunities for wellness at Pitt that students might not be aware of. 

“Society focuses our lives around that part of healthy living. We’re taught that you should be exercising daily and you should be eating healthily, but we’re not necessarily taught that you should be learning how to be happy, you should be finding a spiritual balance within yourself, and you should be giving back to the community,” she said. 

Jessica Murray, a sophomore finance major, teaches kickboxing classes through Pitt Student Affairs’ Healthy U program. She said that she believes it’s important to stay active as a college student because students are constantly surrounded by temptations in campus dining halls and spend most of their time sitting down while studying. She said that sites like Active Pittsburgh and Pitt Intramurals and Recreation’s blog can remind students to stay active. 

“I think it’s important because people use the Internet all the time, so if that kind of thing pops up regularly, it’s a good reminder,” she said.