I just completed a new site for one of my good friends, Brooks Rogers. Brooks is a fishing guide on Lake Fork, Texas. Brooks has fished on Lake Fork since the timber was still green, and he’s guided there for well over a decade. He knows where the fish are! Brooks is one of the best bass fishing guides you’ll find, and he works on one of the best bass lakes in the country. You can see the new site at GuideBrooksRogers.com.
The Old GuideBrooksRogers.com:
New and Improved GuideBrooksRogers.com:
The site is built on WordPress to give Brooks great control over the content. Brooks regularly writes new fishing reports and WordPress is excellent for this because each new fishing report will be written as a blog post. Most of the new site is an improvement over the old site, without a lot of new features. But focus was given to usability of the site, effective navigation and internal linking, and especially the SEO-ability to get better rankings in the search engines. Here’s the top features or improvements of the site:
- Fishing Reports on the home page – it’s currently set to show the most recent three posts. If Brooks posts two or three fishing reports a month, then each post will move off the home page about the time the fishing patterns change.
- Date stamped posts – fishing is very seasonal, so archiving by date is perfect way to save fishing information from past years.
- Archived posts – on Brooks’ previous site only one fishing report was on the site at a time. This limited amount of content really didn’t do so well for SEO. So having the additional content of past fishing reports on the site should help Brooks out in the rankings.
- Comments – Brooks takes hundreds of people out on Lake Fork each year. The Comment system will allow these people to comment on Brooks’ work and on their experience. His old site didn’t have a comment feature, so I think this will be an excellent improvement.
- Videos in Posts – Brooks reguarly does interviews with other guides about Lake Fork, so it was important that he had the ability to post videos of these fishing reports on his site also.
- New Photo Gallery – The new photo gallery uses the highslide method of displaying images. It’s much better than the old version because some of these pics are really big. It’s easy to go from one to the next and quickly view each big bass picture.
- Book a Fishing Trip – Now you can book your guided bass fishing trip through GuideBrooksRogers.com. It’s often hard to firm up plans for a trip like this, so payment and scheduling is still done offline for the customers convenience. Once a trip is booked online, Brooks will personally contact each of his customers to work out the detalis (like I said, he’s a great bass guide).
- Lake Fork Info – The site also has a tie to Weather.com to show the next few days of weather on the lake, and an interactive map of the lake that customers can easily zoom in and move around on to see lake details.
Overall I’m very happy with this site. More importantly, Brooks is happy with the site. This site will be easier to read and use for Brooks’ customers, easier for him to maintain using the WordPress admin, and should provide better rankings in the search engines.
More Screenshots:
Book a Trip on GuideBrooksRogers.com
Example of a Video Report (Brooks is on the left)
See the new site at GuideBrooksRogers.com.
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