Are We Missing Something?
Okay so the weather sucks right now, but that WILL change. It always does. However, we STILL have 17 ski and snowboarding resorts in the region. However, you wouldn’t know it if you pay an online visit to OnTheSnow.com these days.
David Cheraw of Arlington, Virginia emailed me the following this morning:
“Hi Mike. My girlfriend and I live just outside of DC in Arlington and I’ve always enjoyed visiting your page (website) during the winter months. We mostly ski at Massanutten but also enjoy Wintergreen a lot. I started following your page (website) a couple of years ago and recommend it to many of our friends. With the weather being what it is right now, I wanted to ask your opinion about what you think things will look like around the first of January. Also wanted to tell you that since things are so not winter right now, I thought I’d have a look at conditions out west. So I visited onthesnow and I thought you’d find it odd that they don’t even include any of the Virginia ski slopes on their snow report page. Funny huh? I suppose that is why you guys are so needed for our area. Anyway, keep up the good work. By the way, my girlfriend and I also visited Liberty last year and was surprised at how cool that place was to ride. – David Cheraw.”
Editor’s note: I inserted the (website) references each time he called us a “page”. We also responded to his email, but thought we’d share that here as well. Heck it’s a slow news day.
David’s correct! Wow!
Whether you click on SNOW REPORTS or RESORTS, you won’t find anything south of Pennsylvania. They used to be there. I wonder why the omission. I can tell you that you CAN get a report by actually using their search function at the top of the site as long as you know the names of the ski areas you want information for. However, it has been our experience that the majority of people are not going to do that.
Additionally, David mentioned the omission of Virginia ski areas from their snow report or resort links, but they also omit West Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee and North Carolina ski resorts as well. Weird.
Hey Why Didn’t You Guys Tells Us that Our Mobile Website Sucked?!? Well, One Guy did.
Over the last couple of months I have really spent a ton of time getting everything up-to-date and in better shape to provide our visitors with all of the best information with which to plan their ski trips to the mountains of the Southeast and mid-Atlantic. I’ve bragged more than a few times about how we are so far ahead of schedule in terms of content delivery.
Then I received this email a couple of days ago:
Aren’t you guys supposed to be webdesigners? Have you looked at your own website on an iPhone? It sucks, huge. I don’t know of anyone who uses computers anymore so if I were you I’d get your act together and fix the website. I love what you guys are trying to do, but you suck.
Editor’s Note (again): This visitor chose not to share his or her name. I get it. We suck – evidently huge.
Hmmm. They are correct, kind of. Our website is way too busy on the entry page and the snow report is nearly unusable. We’ll get right on that. No, REALLY we will.
It’s funny, but not funny in that we work with thousands of client’s websites all over the world and we let our own website kind of fall through the cracks. It happens, I guess.
The crazy thing is that our anonymous emailer did us a favor. We’re getting bombed with new traffic and since a Pew Research Center survey found that 63 percent of mobile phone owners now use their phone to go online – I guess we’ve got some work to do.
The fortunate thing for SkiSoutheast is that the RESORT PAGES all show really well on mobile devices; as does the Trip Planners (if you’re looking for lodging, etc.), but the SNOW REPORT page is p-r-e-t-t-y hard to make out.
So thank you my anonymous friend. We’ll have the mobile website looking awesome before Snowshoe Mountain gets Cupp Run open!
By the way, OnTheSnow doesn’t show the Southeast and mid-Atlantic ski resorts on their mobile website either!
Until next time…
Enjoy your day and THINK SNOW! THINK COLD! …and Start a Prayer effort! Email me anytime and about anything at: [email protected]
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