HFG is Wounded
I've toiled for the five years that this website has been up and running over many things. The look, the functionality, even its purpose for existing. I never wanted it to be about money or making money. I just wanted a pure dedicated website that fans could read and use.
It was obvious at the end of year two, that getting sportsmen to actually post articles, reports and pictures would be far tougher than I had originally thought. I scrambled to come up with new ways to make it all easier and scoured technologies for the best ways to get everyone involved. If I had a dollar for every hour spent tuning this website, I'd certainly be retired by now for sure.
In the end, the concept was sexy and people, who visit, love the site, but it just wasn’t the right concept. Maybe it was too far ahead of its time, or maybe it was simply too far off the mark of what the modern sportsman wants in a website. Oh man, I had visions of thousands of field reports flowing in and tens of thousands of images being posted, sure. I was even optimistic about the concept of growth and web propagation. Patience is something I have in spades. I've carefully groomed and marketed the site and its concept for years. Word of mouth, business cards, email blasts and social networking sites were my low cost ways to spread the word and try to drum up traffic.
Visiting traffic had indeed grown over these years, but nowhere near what I'd hoped for and more disappointingly, the active participants just never materialized. I've had some friends kick pictures in from time to time and sometimes even an article, but simply not enough to keep the gears turning at a rate high enough to sustain it.
I liken it to turning an engine over. Eventually you get ignition and the machine roars to life under its own power. HuntFishGrill.com was an honest attempt to create a community site for the people and by the people for the simple purpose of entertainment. While I've enjoyed the people I've met and the endless amount of work it takes to keep such a thing running, it just hasn't caught on in that way.
Sound like a eulogy? Well, it is and it isn't. I had huge hopes that this last hunting season would be the one. The breakout season, traffic had paced higher and higher and the website's full rebuild would make it Google strong and poised to be found and used by thousands. It would have taken an epic jolt of dedicated users to start posting and inspire even more to do the same. They didn't. Everything was primed and ready, but they didn't post. Tons of people come to the site and viewed it, but I struggled constantly to keep relevant content up and fresh. That’s what it takes to draw eyeballs. As hardcore as I like to think I am, I just don't have it in me to write that much meaningful content every single day, forever. The end is bittersweet. The end is me admitting it, and disabling the user contribution portion of the site for starters.
I've spent these last few months taking time off from the site and thinking about what could be salvaged from it. Some of you may have noticed the sparse postings during this time. It's really not that I don't care, its more like if the original concept of working that hard to provide a resource for you guys isn't working, then the concept itself needs to change. I thought for sure when I'd added the MMS/Phone upload capability that finally there would be a way to get involved that everyone would use and enjoy. That may have been the last straw for me when it didn't. Even my closest of friends would send the images directly to me, when they had something of interest, leaving even more work for me to do to get it all posted if at all. It’s just too much to ask regular Joes to take time out of their busy lives to upkeep my site, and I know that. Believe me I know, it costs me plenty of hours just to keep the momentum it has now.
I probably sound dejected, mostly because I am. I still believe the site has value. I still believe in my writing style and direction. I still believe there are thousands of sportsmen that want to see the site. What I don't know is how to make it all work. Perhaps in a lot of ways, this is a letter to myself. I celebrate the victories of what HFG is, and have written off the failures and even adjusted on the fly based on what I thought everyone wanted. There have been less than half a dozen recipes in five years, for example. Clearly not the section guys are interested in. I get tons of pictures, on the other hand. They're easy to email and we usually take them on the good days (but what about the bad days? another story altogether).
So what's going to happen? I don't know yet. For now, I plan to start modifying the site to be more of a blog, a straight blog of my writing. I'd still post other content if it were relevant, but I'm not wasting any more time trying to force you guys to write for me (been there, done that). Hopefully the site can grow and evolve to be something else that everyone will want to see and enjoy. Who knows, maybe it'll come out ahead in the end.
-Jason White
