Ok guys...here is what Captain Sims at Crappie Now has to say in reply to a email from one of our members...
We really do appreciate hearing from you. All feedback, good and bad, is important for us to hear - and we have heard both.
It was important for us to rebuild the CrappieNOW.com website for a variety of reasons. (1) The old "page turn" format made it impossible for us to glean accurate analytics. In other words, we knew how many people opened the magazine but we had absolutely no way of knowing exactly which articles you were reading, or weren't reading. That is critical for editorial reasons, and for financial reasons. I'm sure you can understand that advertisers need to know how many people are seeing their ads. Since it is a free magazine, completely paid for by those advertisers, they deserve to know exactly how much bang they're getting for their buck.
(2) In addition, the "page turn" technology was not compatible for mobile users. While I am personally still a "desktop" guy myself, in this day and age more than half of all users rely exclusively on their mobile devices to surf the web. Among the younger crowd, that percentage is MUCH higher. To reach out to the majority of all users, and especially in hopes of building a stronger "millennial" following for our future - and for fishing's future - we felt it essential to create a format more conducive to those users.
(3) Finally, the rebuild allowed us to add several new elements unavailable in the old format. Publisher Dan Dannenmueller outlined several of those enhancements in our news release. We have tagged all of our eight years of content to allow users to easily search through more than 2000+ articles and videos for subjects specifically of interest to them. We have a brag board, shopping cart, and classifieds section whereby boats and, in the future, other items may be sold to other fishermen. A new event calendar will allow tournament managers and directors to load crappie events for all to see and post their own tournament results and pictures.
To be direct, in spite of your important concerns, we can't go back. However any web upgrade is always an evolving, fluid process. To that end we would love to hear your specific suggestions for changes or additions we might be able to make within the new format.
We hope you know that we greatly respect the support and influence of Crappie.com. I'm sure you know we included a profile of creator, Ed Moes, in a recent issue. I have personal friends who are avid Crappie.com users who already expressed some concern to me prior to your e-mail. As I told him, I know change is sometimes difficult. But we hope, in time, as the site evolves and users learn to use the new enhancements, it will grow on you.
I invite you to share this feedback with Crappie.com users as you wish. And again, we will look forward to any suggestions for ways we might be able to enhance the new format.
Capt. Richard Simms
