Tina – please let me know if there are any other features on the site you’re hitting roadblocks with and I will be more than happy to help you work through them. Good luck!

I took a quick look at it just now from a task-based perspective. I’m a horseperson, so I picked a good real-life example: I want to find upcoming equestrian events in my area.

The good news is that the site is aggregating information from a lot of associations/groups who put on shows and events, so there is a lot information available. The bad news is that “upcoming” and “in my area” are not easy to find.

I can sort results by date, but that shows me dozens of pages of results starting in 2007, so I have to poke through those to find things happening in the next few weeks/months. The “Classic Event Search” (http://www.active.com/advanced_search.cfm?CHECKSSO=0) is better, but a bit confusing with both a “month” drop-down list and a date range. But hey, it works if you can muddle through.

The “classic” search includes a zip code field, but no radius. Will that find only things *in* my zip code?

The results for the classic search are in tiny text, and inexplicably listed 10 at a time.

Once I find an event I’m interested in, there is virtually no information – just what was culled from the organization’s site. There’s a Comments area, but no activity that I could find. The location map is downright misleading – it only shows the default location for the zip code, not the location of the event/facility itself. That’s not horrible – it’s nice to see a general location, but the site should say very clearly something to the effect of “don’t go here!” I could see people getting lost…

There is at least a link to the organization’s or event’s site, so I can get more info. Overall it’s better than a poke in the eye, y’know. But I hope they’ll take a look at what their site visitors are trying to accomplish, and streamline the process to support that.