One of my all-time favorite figures in the media world is Don Logan, who ran Time Inc. for ten stellar years and did a no less outstanding turn as the co-COO of Time-Warner. He retired a few years back to Birmingham, Alabama and began investing in local businesses, including the Barons baseball team, and spending more time on his favorite occupation, largemouth bass fishing.
I talked to him from time to time about the GoFISHn project, and tried to get him involved as an advisor. He seemed interested but not quite ready to take the bait, and last year I found out why.
Don long had his eye on a much bigger project: the acquisition of B.A.S.S. and Bassmaster from ESPN. That deal went through last fall, and Don and his partners Jerry McKinnis and Jim Copeland got started on the tough business of extracting the extensive B.A.S.S. businesses (Bassmaster magazine and website, Classic, Elite and Open tournaments) from ESPN.
That led to a call from Don asking if I'd take on the effort to re-build the Bassmaster.com site. In my former life at Time Inc., that was my line of work. The project was clearly a terrific challenge for an iconic brand. The 500,00-member B.A.S.S. organization is by far the biggest and more powerful media and membership entity in the fishing world. And it had some obvious resonance with GoFISHn. I said "yes."
That commenced a very hectic six-month project that examined questions like this: How can a small B.A.S.S. staff and run a very high-powered website without the deep pockets and very deep technical expertise of ESPN? At the same time we had to move quickly into the relentless planning and execution to design and build a much-improved website on a tight budget and a short timeline.
The result of all that is the new Bassmaster.com, which launched on schedule, May 1, and on budget. Here's a link to our press release about the project. Don, as you can read, is pleased with the outcome.
The new Bassmaster is a significant improvement over the old one in several respects:
Design. The former site was shoe-horned into an ESPN-page template designed to showcase video. That makes sense for ESPN.com, which is centerered on lucrative game highlight video, but was not quite right for Bassmaster, which prides itself on great writing and photography, as well as strong tournament video coverage. To re-balance that design equation, we created deep editorial wells on the home page and main channel pages to better showcase every piece of content equally -- articles, photos, and video.
Recirculation. Every Web editor knows that it's all about keeping the visitor clicking, and the former site had far too many dead-ends, especially on stories and photo galleries. The new site has multiple options on every page to get reader clicking to the next story.
Organization. Bassmaster is about a few clear subjects: tournament bass fishing, professional anglers, bass records, bass fishing gear, bass fishing tips, and the Federation Nation organization. The former site did not make that clear in the top navigation, which probably confused visitors. We streamlined and focused the navigation as well as the organization of the content.
Social. To take full advantage of all that Facebook is doing for publishers, we incorporated Facebook "likes" and comments on all content pages, as well as a Tweet link.
Search. The former site search was unhelpful because results incorporated everything on ESPN. The new site is built in Drupal, which means content is easy to "tag" content with subjects and the site search is SOLR, which is designed to use tags to organize search results. It works really well, and Bassmaster fans now can find what they're looking for.
Professional Angler Stats. Bassmaster has a treasure trove of stats for tournaments and pro anglers, and ESPN did a good job making the data interactive. We improved the page-layouts for the pro anglers, added more data, added more ways to sort the data, and tucked in a news feed of stories for each angler. It's stats heaven for pro angler fans. See rockstar pro bass angler Kevin VanDam, for example.
Tournament coverage. The Bassmaster team works extremely hard to cover a demanding tournament schedule and produces everything from live video to articles to photo galleries to real-time live leaderboards and more. On the former site, that impressive media line-up was not easy to find or follow. We created persistent homepages for each tournament to capture all the content, and we placed a navigation module for that tournament above every relevant article, gallery, video post etc. The first tournament since launch, the Bassmaster Elite Pride of Georgia, launched today, and so far the new set-up is working well.
Publishing. It's a shame when online publishing systems are so cumbersome that editors are reluctant to use them. Bassmaster's new Drupal Open Publish system (designed by Phase2 Technology) makes publishing online what it should be -- fast and easy. Now the editorial teams can publish more and publish faster, which is a key ingredient for success in online media.
We made many additional improvements in the realms of performance, SEO, video, analytics and more.
As a veteran of many projects like this, I have to say Bassmaster.com has been one of the smoothest and most enjoyable. The Bassmaster crew are both both good teachers and good students. The ESPN technical team was unstintingly helpful and resourceful. Phase2 Technology team did a great job, and taught me a lot about Drupal. And my friends and colleagues Dmitry Paperny, Matt Kaufman, Brian McClintock and Clarence Kwei were as ever invaluable sources of experience and insight.
What's next? as I mentioned in the press release, the next big step is the launch of Bassnation, which will come in a few weeks. Stay tuned. -Ned Desmond