New website format you asked for feedback on I don’t like it. What problems did you solve by making this change? Was anybody complaining? Everything was all right there laid out plainly on one page. Now I have to tap to go here or tap to go there etc. to find things that all used to be on the front homepage of the surf report. I thought the other format was perfectly good. That’s my two cents and I m sticking to it.
Thanks for asking.
Anthony
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Anthony,
Thank you so much and I initially agreed. I told my staff “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” as I loved the old format and more. They pointed out that the old format is not conducive to mobile and the world is changing toward mobile and we looked it up and more than 50% of people using our website are now on a mobile device and this demographic is growing. The old report on mobile had way way stretched out photos and did not fit mobile at all. Yes it was great on a big computer.
I was at the beach yesterday and a surfer came up and commented on the new site. He said he likes it better as he said it is “cleaner” . I am still getting used to it and still prefer the old one. The good news is we can tweak this new site to make it very much like the old site but better because now you will be able to view it on a mobile device too. The old site was nearly a decade old.
As for your specific observation / complaint, I agree. I like the long scroll with data right there. But it was pointed out we can bring the blogs up closer to the top of the page by breaking the data into clickable links/sections and thus the blogs the staff works so hard on can be much easier to find.
Tory
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Good morning,
Thanks for the input on the new website! The main reason for switching to a new theme was that Google and other search engines are putting more emphasis on mobile friendliness (over 60% of our traffic is via mobile device) and we needed the surf report website to be up to 2020 web design standards. That said, I have been tweaking the site daily to make it more useable, and you may notice now that if you click on one of the Surf Report thumbnails, it now opens that report in a separate page that has the entire report “laid out plainly on one page” for everyone to read. The issue we had before was that the report was over 2000 pixels tall, and was taking up too much screen real estate on our homepage.
While the Surf Station website is mostly a surf report and forecast, it also serves to provide information about our surf lessons, rentals, surf team, surfing news locally and worldwide, and serves as a source of entertainment and education for northeast Florida surfers. Our goal is to provide a platform that is easy to use on mobile and on desktop computers, and will allow us to expand our content more efficiently into 2021 and beyond. And of course, it allows our staff to communicate with our customers about new products, sales coming up soon and events we plan throughout the year.
If you have any specific issues with the new surf report website please email me at eddie@surf-station.com and I will be sure to fix them right away!
Thanks,
Eddie Toy
Webmeister
