After Thrive Online, successor to the The Healthy Living Channel, was purchased by AOL, I was asked to build a small "placeholder" site for Health. I called it HealthMag.com; its purpose was simply to support the magazine's subscription and promotional efforts, to provide a place for readers to communicate with one another, and to build traffic for the upcoming Health.com, a domain we had always owned and were preparing to develop.

Though we never regarded it as a standalone business, HealthMag.com generated far more traffic than we'd expected. I redesigned it after nine months, tying the look more closely to the magazine's and funneling more traffic to the discussion groups, which accounted for much of the time visitors spent at the site. In January 2001, HealthMag.com was replaced with the more ambitious Health.com.