Oh, What a Tangled Web…
LISTEN: (4 minutes, 56 seconds)
FROM TIME TO TIME, we use this space to report on changes, updates and challenges related to our “adventures” in cyberspace. As many readers know, Texas Fish & Game has had a presence on what old-timers call The World Wide Web since the early days of Compuserve and screeching modems.
We launched www.FishGame.com in 1995. In the succeeding decades, we have gone through a number of site overhauls—all of them frustrating and painfully slow, and never quite meeting our expectations.
And so now, on the threshold of the site’s thirtieth year in existence, we’ve embarked on another effort to redesign it.
Website creation and design, in 2024, is supposed to be easy-peazy, according to the ads you see everywhere from services like GoDaddy, WIX, and a hundred others. Got a business? Upload your logo, a few photos and a list of your products and/or services, and voilà, minutes later your site is up and running and your user traffic is piling up.
But in OUR business, it just doesn’t work that way. As a media outlet, our main product is the site itself and the content we create. We do have physical products—shirts, books and our magazines, Fish & Game and Lakes & Bays—but it is the stories that we produce and curate that draw visitors to the site and, hopefully, keep them coming back.
Since we’ve been doing this for so long, there is a LOT of content. In our favor, we’re not a conventional news media outlet, so most of what we have in our archives is “evergreen,” not perishable like breaking news stories.
A story about time-honored techniques for catching largemouth during the spawn, or targeting bull reds in the fall, or stalking late season bucks, has no expiration date. This makes it imperative for us to keep all of this material available and easy to access.
Our site has more than 11,000 articles—and more get added on a daily basis. And while some of our content is reporting on stories from other sources that Editor-in-Chief Chester Moore personally curates, most of our content is original, created by Chester, Lenny Rudow and the other members of our pro staff. There is no algorithm scraping the work of other sources and passing it off as ours.
So the task of improving the way all this content is presented is no small endeavor. We’ve had our team, Troy and Melinda Buss and Sharon Heir, working on it for the better part of the past year. We started rolling it out in July. The goal is to make the site cleaner, organized better, and most of all, faster to load and deliver the information you’re looking for. Check it out at FishGame.com and let us know what you think.
Breaking the Sound Barrier
One of the first things we did as a part of our site renovation was to incorporate audio into our stories, allowing you to listen to them. We began this process with the articles in the digital editions of the magazine.
These audio versions are quite good and make it easier than ever to take our digital issues on the road, or water. You can download the entire issue and listen to it anywhere, any time.
Our plan is to phase in audio versions of as many of the non-issue articles posted on the site as well as those in our digital magazine editions.
Stay tuned.
• • •
A Great Loss, But a Grand and Lasting Legacy
BOB SEALY who, with his wife Donna, founded the Big Bass Splash tournament series, died in July after a hard-fought battle with cancer.
Bob was a lifelong avid fisherman who was also a visionary entrepreneur. In 1984, he envisioned a tournament series that would enable everyday anglers to compete in pro-level tournaments with the opportunity to take home pro-level winnings.
The Big Bass Splash made a huge splash of its own in the world of amateur competitive fishing. Thousands of anglers were drawn to the tournaments, first held on Sealy’s home lake of Sam Rayburn, later spreading to other Texas lakes, and then to venues in other states. Bob’s contests were distinguished not only by the big payouts but also by his own stage presence. As gifted a showman as he was a businessman, Bob knew how to keep an audience riveted to the action at his events.
Those events have contributed millions of dollars to charities such as Ronald McDonald House and St. Jude Children’s Hospital.
We’ve been partners with Bob and Donna for almost thirty years and count them—and their daughter Nicole, who now runs Sealy Outdoors—as cherished friends.
Bob Sealy will most certainly be missed. But his legacy will outlive us all.
E-mail Roy at rneves@fishgame.com and Ardia at aneves@fishgame.com
