Bassmaster.com relaunches

For the past several months the Bassmaster.com crew has been quietly working away on a slew of improvements to the website. On January 11 you’ll see a new look, and under the hood, we’re upgrading the technology. Our goal is pretty simple: to super-serve bass fishing fans wherever, whenever, and however, you connect with us.

First let me share just how much you’ve been connecting with Bassmaster.com. In 2015, an average of 712,000 of you (in web terms, unique visitors) came to the site each month. And for the full year, we had more than 235 million page views and 7 million video views. Thank you!

With things going so well, you might wonder, “Why change the website now?” Well, the answer is, to continue growing we need to make some improvements.

The Bassmaster.com you’ve been visiting for the past five years launched in 2011, shortly after Don Logan, Jerry McKinnis, and Jim Copeland bought the company from ESPN. In terms of technology, a lot has changed in those five years. In 2011 you’d have been hard pressed to find people watching bass fishing tournaments on their phones. Today nearly half the people visiting Bassmaster.com are doing so on mobile devices.

A big reason for our relaunch is getting Bassmaster.com into a “responsive design.” That means the site will be optimized for whatever device you’re using — be it a desktop computer, a tablet or a cell phone. It will be easier to read articles, scroll through photo galleries or watch the LIVE Show.

The site will also have bigger images to better showcase the anglers, and the sport in general. You’ll find the main pages will be longer, with room to feature more content. And we’re updating the video platform to give you a better viewing experience.

On the advertising side, the industry has been trending toward bigger ad units, and fewer ad units on most pages. We’re moving in that direction to better showcase our fantastic sponsors.

We’ll roll out the new website in several phases. The basic site launches Jan. 11, with additional features coming over the next few months. Initially the new site won’t contain the historic tournament data. We’re in the middle of restructuring that information to eventually display it in new ways and places. We should have the tournament data back in place by the Classic.

Relaunching a website is a lot like a complete home remodel. I mean the kind where you tear a house down to the studs, and there’s lots of mud and sawdust all over the place. At the new Bassmaster.com, some things may be a little messy when we first open the doors, you may not be able to find something initially, but give us a little time and we’ll have a bigger, better website for you to enjoy.

We believe you’ll like it!