Sent to them with my real name and links to my linked in profile....
Hopefully, we'll at least get a reply on this.
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Hey guys – Please forward this to your management… Hopefully this will be a wake up call.
My user ID is biglenr… I’ve been a member of the site since 2002, and on your baseball council since about 2005 or 2006. I’m also an ecommerce professional, you can check my profile on Linkedin for my qualifications, and I’m frustrated with what is being done with the site.
I’ve got to tell you… You’re killing the site through inattention. The last update was in 2009. The same strategies have worked since that day. No new challenges to overcome, just the same one over and over. 5 years between updates on the web… That’s an eternity.
You’re not bringing in new users. Perhaps you’re marketing within the Fox web sites (I actually know that you are), but you’re not spending much on Google or Bing search words. I went to spyfu.com to look up your spend, and it’s essentially negligible.
If you’re relying on organic search, that’s not doing it for you either. You wind up below the fold… I don’t have to tell you how few people bother to go to the 2nd page of search results, or even to scroll down. I’m sure Fox has some SEO specialists… Try to get them to work with you to get your organic results up.
Existing users are leaving…. There is normal attrition in any hobby, and it’s worse when the product is stale. You’re not bringing in new users to replace them. That makes theme leagues and spots in progressive leagues hard to fill.
When new users get here, they are treated to a drubbing by open league sharks using the same boring (but darwinally optimized) cookie strategy that ensures that the new user doesn’t want to stay.
And of course, your facebook and social media presence is rudimentary, your site is incredibly unfriendly to the mobile phones which are rapidly replacing conventional PC’s as the preferred web browsing tools, and you’re trapped in the last decade for user experience. What’s your bounce rate for mobile phone users? I would bet that it’s very high.
Noise was made about doing a site redesign last year. That noise has petered out and all we hear is silence. However, let me say that a redesign without functional changes is like putting lipstick on a pig… It may look a little better, but it’s still a pig. You have game play issues on the site that should be addressed, from fatigue abuse, a skewing towards deadball pitchers, undervaluation of the SB, and unrealistic secondary postions being used (Hojo playing errorless ball at SS, for example). And so many more.
So in quick summary
- You’re alienating your existing customers through inattention
- The game play is far from perfect, needs to continually evolve
- Little to no marketing to attract new customers
- New customers that do arrive get their butts handed to them in open leagues and leave
- Ignoring the driving trends of the marketplace by not getting involved in social media
- Old user interface is a poor fit for mobile phones
Any plans to address this, or should we say “Thanks for the memories” and move on to another hobby? I’m posting this as a thread in the main sim forums… If you don’t reply to me, please reply there.
Thanks –
Len (Biglenr)