Welcome to the new look World Sea Fishing!
World Sea Fishing will this summer celebrate its 16th birthday, so we thought it was about time we gave the site an update. Not just a lick of paint, but a root and branch fettle!
The site now reaches in excess of 190,000 unique browsers each month. The redesign of the webzine is the first step in a long process that will see the entire WSF web site change over time. First though, we’ll take a look at what is happening with the webzine. There is a little snippet of news regarding the forum further down too.
THE WSF WEB ZINE DESIGN
The new WSF has been designed with a mobile first strategy. We recognise that a large and growing number of you are not only consuming our content on your desktops but also on your phones and tablets. The design is a responsive design that will change and adapt to whatever display you are viewing the site on. To get the very best experience from the site however, we recommend you view the site on either a tablet such as an iPad or on a screen with a resolution of at least 1280 x 1024.
The whole webzine has been engineered to be as visual as possible. At the top of the front page we have a featured block, this block will display the four most prominent articles on the site at the moment. Underneath this we have two further blocks that give you access to the latest articles from the rest of site. At the bottom of the front page – within time, a most popular block will appear that shows you the most popular articles of the week.
To the right of every page we have a Google search box so you can search the site for any articles you are keen to discover. Underneath we have our most recent videos on WSF widget. Below this our topic tag cloud, which gives you quick access to all of the articles relating to an angling subject. New for 2014 is the AddThis Recommendation engine. This will recommend any WSF articles or forum threads that might be of interest to you, once you’ve read the article you are reading.
On the social side, every page now has a floating share bar to the right hand side of the page when viewing on a desktop computer. On a tablet/mobile these are dropped to the bottom of your screen. Clicking these buttons will share the article to any of your friends on social media including Facebook, Google +, Twitter and Pintrest. We also have follow buttons in the top right hand corner if you want to follow our pages and each article has in content share buttons too.
Articles have also been redesigned. Now more visually appealing with the use of large, high resolution photographs within content and also the new header image that describes each article.
Due to the fact WSF has been around for so long we have also introduced two dates on our articles. A Posted Date which is the date the article first appeared on WSF and an Updated Date – the date the article was last updated with new information.
THE WSF WEB ZINE CONTENT
The webzine part of WSF is the oldest part of the website. One of the first digital online magazines specifically about sea fishing, the WSF site holds a vast array of information on all aspects of sea fishing. Whilst much of this knowledge is still useful today, some is now old and dated. Many of the informational articles are as old as the site itself and we all know how much things have changed in the world of sea fishing during that time.
The first step in our editorial process was to work out exactly what information was useful and what needed a new home. We looked at each of our old sections and through a process of elimination we cut down the article structure from 900 to just over 280. We haven’t simply lost over 600 articles; these articles are available on our new Archive Site.
We then changed the content structure to better reflect the articles on the site. We have kept our blogs; they are one of our most popular features and contain a wealth of tips on all aspects of angling. We’ve held on to most of the blogs produced since 2010.
Features are now Stories. A lot of feedback we receive is that people love to read fishing stories, so all of our destination features are now in our Angling Stories section. This is the place to go, kick back, relax and read about fishing from all over the UK and the world. Our new mobile and tablet friendly design means you can do this with ease from your armchair.
Our instructional items have undergone the biggest change, content wise. We have removed most of our species guides and replaced them with new ones in a new section called “How to catch” – this is broken down into two sections, Boat and Shore and contains practical advice on how to catch the most popular species swimming in our waters.
Tackling up is the new section for all things tackle. From looking after reels to using booms. Again a lot of old articles have been archived from this section and we are currently working our way to producing new more modern, informative tackle articles.
We now have fully illustrated rig making guides specific to different species. In addition we feature common rigs, specialist rigs and a new, work in progress section called “How to make rigs.” This will cover everything around rig making that is applicable to either all rigs or a large block of rigs.
Baiting up is our baits section. Here you can find profiles on major baits that include information on how to collect and store them. A new section of this guide is our Baits step by step guide. These are fully illustrated bait how to guides, specific for each different species.
Tactics is a collection of everything else. If it doesn’t fit in either our How To, Tackle or Bait sections it fits in here. Tactics includes species specific alternative techniques like quiver tipping for mullet, it also includes shore and boat fishing tactics and useful information.
The Lures section is an on going work of progress. A lot of the articles in here have been archived. We’ve kept the current stuff and the things we still think are relevant to today’s sea angler and the rest are gone. We are currently in the process of lining up some lure fishing guys to write good, quality content for this section. Keep your eyes peeled!
The reviews section is another area where we can and will do better. We have a number of reviews lined up over the next 12 months and we hope to keep everybody as up to date as possible with the latest gear. One thing we won’t be doing is reviewing products that aren’t going to be up to the job from the outset. It is pointless wasting our time writing the review and your time reading it. So when people say “but there are no bad reviews” that’s right, there aren’t…it’s a waste of both of our time.
Finally TV. Pretty self explanatory this one. This will in time become the home for WSF Videos, for the moment though, it’s our little collection of the best from Youtube.
WSF FORUMS
For the moment we have done nothing here. The forums are exactly as they have always been. However, the forums have not been looked at for coming up 3 years and its time we looked at them again.
Presently we are using vBulletin 4 to present our forums. Whilst vBulletin was always the market leader in forum software times have changed, quite radically. Over the coming months we will be making the transition to Xenforo. Xenforo is a forum platform designed by the original team of vBulletin. It is quicker, more user friendly and generally a better platform for what we want to do with the forum going forward.
Importantly Xenforo is another one of those systems that is designed Mobile First. So users will get a great forum experience no matter what devices they are using to browse WSF.
We will have further announcements on the direction of the forum over the next week or so. We are also inviting members of the WSF forum to come forward and help us test the next version of the WSF Forums, as Beta Testers. More information on this soon.
OTHER STUFF
Coming up we have lots and lots of projects and additions to the WSF site. We’ve teamed up with a large angling holidays company to bring you an interactive destination guide specifically for the travelling angler. We are also in the process of launching a new sub site to WSF that allows Charter Boats, Tackle Shops, Clubs, Bait Diggers and any other angling service the ability to upload their details to our site, as well as load their own catch reports and photos. There are a couple more projects in the pipeline but…you’ll have to wait for those 
Anyway – that’s all for now. From all of the team we hope you enjoy the new webzine and within its many pages of content you can find something useful that either enhances your angling experience or whets the appetite to make you get out and wet a line, whatever the weather.
Tight Lines
Mike Thrussell Jnr
Founder, World Sea Fishing.
The post New look WSF webzine appeared first on World Sea Fishing - Sea Angling Webzine and Forum.