This was posted on our main site — snowgoer.com — to explain some of the changes you may have seen right here on this site. As note, race fans, don’t be scared off — we’re hoping to have even more race coverage in the future, as well as bloggers from across the spectrum of snowmobiling.
If you’re looking for fresh stories, cool photo essays, interesting twists or even your own place to blog about all things snowmobile related, we’ve got a sister web site to tell you about.
A couple years ago, when we VERY sadly said goodbye to Snow Week magazine and its racing coverage, we started a sister web site called www.SnowGoerRacing.com. On it, we allowed people who are close to snowmobile racing to write their own stories about race events, racers and other things going on in their community.
It was a pretty good site, but one thing we discovered through our sister sites in other markets (ATV, motorcycle, etc.) is that a blog site is a great thing for Joe Regular Consumer as well, not just racing.
Beyond that, the WordPress software the site utilizes is a lot easier for our own staff to work with remotely. For example, when Yamaha allowed me to test its power steering model for the first time last January, I could immediately blog on that site from my hotel room, telling what the machine felt like, but I couldn’t access this web site from the road. Also, that site easily allows photo essays and slide shows, so it’s where we uploaded 32 pictures from this year’s Snow Goer Great Escape Tour, for example.
So, this spring, we decided to officially spread the site’s focus – www.snowgoerracing.com is now blog.snowgoer.com. Once a week all year long you’ll find my own blog on there, and you’ll also be seeing a lot of Managing Editor Andy Swanson on there as well, and occasionally Associate Editor Tom Kaiser.
Then, during the season, you’ll get to see updates from the trails, breaking news, photo blogs and all sorts of things over there that we can’t do here.
Beyond that, it’s not just a blog site for us – it’s set up to be shared with other potential snowmobiling bloggers. Insiders from the snowmobile industry, snowmobile racing, people in grass roots organizations – or even Joe Regular Snowmobiler who has a lot on his mind.
That’s right, even you could be a blogger. If you’re interested, drop me an email at jprusak@affinitygroup.com – we’re looking for people who are articulate, are comfortable posting blogs on a WordPress format (it’s easy to learn) and who have interesting things to say about the snowmobile industry or snowmobiling.
And, for those of you who have turned to the SnowGoerRacing.com web site looking for racing news, don’t worry – racing will always be a part of the site, and we are hoping to grow our list of bloggers in that arena as well.