Coming this spring: New improved masterstrack.com
Sharp eyes may have noticed that our home page now registers 800,000-plus views on the hit counter. It’s kind of bogus, since we reached that figure years ago sitewide. But 800K looks cool. How many times has the whole site been accessed since December 1999 (when Dave Clingan and I merged our sites)? I haven’t a clue. Millions maybe. But I’m certain of something: You ain’t seen nuthin yet.
In February, to mark the 10th anniversary of the Masters Track & Field Home Page on AOL (the progenitor site). we’re gonna start a serious and substantive redesign.
My teen-age son calls masterstrack.com a “second-generation” Web site (with first-generation apparently being text only.) My son says we’re into the fourth generation now. Gulp. Guess I gotta get with it.
I know, I know. Content is king. Not bells and whistles and cheap eye-candy gimmicks. But I’m unhappy with the static nature of the current home page, which doesn’t telegraph the great, updated material within. (I’m also chastened by the Internet Yellow Pages, which in recent years has given masterstrack.com a low rating for site design.)
Anyhoo, the masses of masters are my No. 1 concern. I want mcom to fulfill my original dreams: to celebrate masters track and offer a comprehensive resource for everyone — novices, longtime trackos, and the press and public.
Dave provides the guts of the site — its meet calendars, results and rankings. But except for the blog (a daily habit in recent months), I haven’t done enough to update the subsections: Links, Training, Photos, etc. A few pages haven’t been updated in years. Many links are beyond dead. Embarrassing.
My goal is to make mcom more professional looking and easier to update. Pruning will occur. My Views page, for example, is moot, since I have this blog. Posting a link to Egroup (a misnomer, since it’s now Yahoo Groups) on the home page has led some people to think that it’s a subsection of this site. Uh, no. I was just helping the masterstf mailing list get some traction in its early years. Also not needed. Yahoo Group (founded in 1999) has grown to 736 members.
Most of all, I’m mindful of my own admonition that sports sites evoke excitement, lest their sport be judged boring (as is case with the WMA Web site). I’ve also slammed USATF for not updating its masters section, which remains sterile and out-of-date. So it’s only fair that masterstrack.com be subject to the same critique. Time to get in gear.
Anyhoo, I’m listening to you.
So let me know what you’d like to see in masterstrack.com.
It’s still a hobby for Dave and me (despite the megabux we make from banner advertisers, hahaha). But we aim to please.
4 Responses
Masters need somewhere to go to get up-to-date meet results from all over the country, plus up-to date news of what’s going on in masters. If your readers could contribute write-ups, results, etc., masterstrack would become a place masters turned to on a daily basis.
The more info masterstrack can get out there, the more people will tune in to read it.
Good luck! And let me know if I can help.
At least 1,169 of those hits are mine! I love this site.
Ken:
I have been reading your site for about the last year and I absolutely love it! I maintain a sports blog over at http://www.oldenfatsport.com. Our motto at the site is to ‘Stay in The Game.’ There are a lot of us out there that will never hang up those track cleats. Can’t wait to see the new site this spring.
Mike Furir Mike 85
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