CHANGES AT TEXAS FLY CASTER
As fishers we know one thing is a constant – change. It can be small changes, as small as a fly, or big changes as personal as job loss, or a new career start. People, friendships, fishing, business, just about everything has changed over the last few years.

Here at TFC you have seen changes that could look radical if you don’t visit often, and would be hardly noticeable if you visit daily (which thankfully many do). Changes that have already come this year are the move from having discussion boards hosted here at TFC to elimination of those, and a move to the highly, no joke, highly successful Texas Fly Reports site. Texas Fly Reports has an RSS topic feed at the bottom of this site so that you can see what the latest discussions are with out leaving TFC. If you want to go directly to either TFRs or Oklahoma Fly Report, those links are always in the left column. And this won’t be a year to rest on my laurels either.

The adventure in socialism, “Guides” page, has been modified to feature paying guide’s shingles, and so far I am the only one who’s paid up for this benefit. Be sure to have a look at the unique approach I have to guiding – combining fishing and photography lessons. There’s not enough hours in the day to try and explain how something like being on a high traffic site would be beneficial to a guide, or through the new branch of my photography business – DentonDigital.com – a website design and hosting business that concentrates on building sites like this one for organizations looking to have complete control of their websites. Of course I will concentrate on one of the most lacking segments of website design and functionality – fishing guides. It’s amazing how bad so many sites are! They’re leaving a lot of business on the table – untapped.

As far as a redesign of the TFC site, I’ve been threatening for a long time, and have yet to find a new look worthy of the look and functionality of the current site. It could still happen …

We are still trying to figure out what to do with www.dfwflyfishing.com, a site I created for Joel Hays. He’s hanging it up as far as paid guiding trips, in favor of unpaid child rearing. Heck of a great trade in my estimation. If anyone has suggestions on that transition, and how to drive his significant traffic to my guiding services page, I am all eyes and ears.

The brand new site www.buyafishinglicense.com is up and running. I was motivated to create that site on a bumpy ride to the launch in Louisiana last month. Give it a try on your smart phone and see how cleanly it takes you to the fishing license site for your state. Advertising on that national site is available now.

WEATHER
They are calling for snow followed by rain here in North Texas tonight. Hard to believe, but true. Lakes are coming up nicely in this part of Texas, and I have to admit I didn’t think the epic drought would be showing signs of ending this soon. Make no mistake, we here in North Texas are in much better shape than the rest of the State of Texas. Predicting fishing is absolutely more difficult than predicting the weather, but if things continue along this line, it won’t take much rain this spring to trigger hybrid running action in the creeks and rivers. Spur of the moment guided trips for hybrids will happen if conditions line up for that phenomenon. And the rising water, over arid greenery, means lake flats will be crawling with bass and carp as the water warms up.

I just want to take a half minute to bring some new websites to reader’s attention.

After a horrible experience trying to purchase a Louisiana fishing license by smart phone on the way to the boat ramp, and giving up, I thought it would be helpful to create a well functioning site for anyone looking to buy a license for any state in the USA.

Buy A Fishing License is a new site created to make access to online purchase of licenses easy via smart phone, pda, or home computer.

The site, www.buyafishinglicense.com, is a portal to other state’s sites, drilled down to get someone looking to purchase a fishing license as close to where they need to go as is possible. In doing the work for this site, I found it amazing how often individual state’s sites change. It is apparent, in times of budget crunch, they figured out how to reduce employee hours by redirecting this kind of thing to online resources. Some of the sites are still pretty weak, and not geared toward maximizing ease of use. Security is something we all take into our own hands every time we head off to sites we consider “safe.” Make sure you know where you’re going – no matter what.

In an effort to increase world dominance of distributing fly fishing information, there’s also the relatively new www.oklahomaflyreport.com, and as you are well aware, www.texasflyreports.com is picking up a lot of steam.

Hardly a day goes by when I don’t discover some long existing site that does what some new site, perhaps including these sites, tries to do. It appears there are almost as many discussion boards as there are fly fishers discussing. A quick way to determine how prescient a discussion board may be is by checking when the most recent post was made. The vast majority of boards are, like blogs, abandoned. And that’s why I am busy establishing a new network of boards under the broad banner of “fly report” this year. It will be an extremely difficult market to crack, but new discussion boards that will enlighten anyone from anywhere – about the specific state they are in, or interested in fly fishing in – will be slowly creeping into existence throughout 2012.

TEXAS FLY CASTER

Texas Fly Caster is due for some heavy tinkering as well. It ain’t quite broke, but that’s the best time to fix it. You have probably noticed that some of the sidebar features are hobbling around a bit, an get moved around regularly just to keep them visible.

- The guides page will be downscaled from several guides to just one. The experiment in socialism is over.
- I am also looking to reskin the entire site with a new banner and new look. If you are an artist into the fly, I welcome your ideas, and can even budget in your art for the banner.
- I am finally deleting the “Discussion” page completely from the menu. Discussion is now at www.texasflyreports.com.

SUGGESTIONS ARE WELCOME AS ALWAYS

If you have seen other fly sites that you like the look of, feel free to suggest I take a look at them. This site has a lot of bells and whistles (for better or worse) that have made it the number one organic search site for fly fishing articles about Texas. There’s not really much we can change that would damage the rankings. Content is, as they say, content.

It is my pleasure to make you aware of a new spinoff website from Texas Fly Caster. Late last week we were finally able to get the powerful, albeit complex YaBB bulletin board www.texasflyreports.com off the ground, if only a few feet off the ground and running.

Texasflyreports.com is a direct take from the legendary Texas website www.texasflyreport.com, which pulled up internet stakes about three years ago, and closed their doors after an illustrious and successful trail blazing life in the digital realm. Many lamented the loss of that site openly, and the quick and merciless death that was visited upon their treasured threads.

The refreshing thing about this new child, Texas Fly Reports, is that I am a doting grandparent, and confident of the parent’s hands the site is in. It’s hands-free for me, and the only influences I should have are in general direction, and specific appearance, advertising and technical functionality of the site. That last part of my job description is potentially the heaviest lifting of all. I am completely confident you will enjoy the superior functionality of YaBB Bulletin Board software that makes Texas Fly Reports work, but the software is complex and not as nearly as easy to deal with as a non-programmer, non-coder would want. That single fact lead from an April 1 roll out to a July 1 roll out.

The casual boards you find here at “DISCUSSION BOARDS” will continue to exist and I still invite you to use them as they will be much more tailored to the information in this site than the new Texas Fly Reports site. Texas Fly Reports is for Texas, and will have more of a statewide appeal.

Readers of Texas Fly Caster have a unique opportunity to influence the statewide Texas Fly Reports. Let me know what a good bulletin board should and should not include, and grandpa and the parents will take that as high level advice about raising this digital kid.

If you do visit Texas Fly Reports now, you won’t find much. Right now, it’s still in the infancy stage with no clear “look,” and we don’t even know what color its eyes will be yet. Rest assured, the look will be changing rapidly, and constantly for the next few weeks.

The things that I hope make the new Texas Fly Reports different are, a) ease of use, b) zero tolerance for cyber-bullies, racism, antagonism, heck all bad -isms!, c) a high tolerance for beginners, d) strong interest in bringing youth into the sport, and finally, e) extreme focus in converting lurkers into posters by all practical means. Solving the internet’s “Lurker Problem” will arguably be the most difficult task, but we will not resort to cheap, or unseemly tactics like those found on other sites (inflating reader counts OR allowing hateful discussions to progress).

Advertising on Texas Fly Reports is accepted and welcome there as well as here. Rates can be locked in at pretty low annual rates as we get the Texas Fly Reports site off the ground.