First - "Constructive feedback is welcome." Well this is the fire and folks here say pretty much what they want to say. No one person here has control over what other folks say/think here. Arguing with folks here is a waste of time. So you are just going to have to filter through the comments and decide what you think is helpful.
Fair enough. I used the word "constructive" because when we receive emails that say nothing more than "YOUR SITE SUCKS! YOU SHOULD BE BLINDED BY ACID!" (and yes, we've received that exact message) it doesn't give us anything to work on. We're looking for specifics, so we know what to fix.
We spent several years redesigning the site (in our spare time, after working for a living) and purely negative comments don't feel too good. Thankfully, most of the feedback has been positive. But we still want to continue improving things wherever we can, while still achieving the goals we needed to tackle with the site redesign.
I see from the article that one can still use the classic version of your site.
https://classic.ammoseek.com/How long will it be available? If you are willing to keep it functional and give folks an easy way to keep using it this would go a long way towards keeping us old timers happy.
We plan for it to be available for at least the next year or so. But when we add new features, we'll only be adding them to the new site. For examples, you can only search on a RANGE of grains on the new site. And there are a lot of ways to customize your experience on the new site that do not (and will never) happen on the classic site.
So basically the classic version will exist as-is for at least a year, but it won't continue to get improvements like the new site will.
Important Note: both the new site and the classic site search the same data, so the results pages should be the same for identical searches.
I see that a better mobile experience was a key part of the re-design motivation. I get that because more and more people - esp. the younger folks use their phone as the primary interface. Not me and not a lot of folks on the fire. Those youngsters are the future and we are not. OTOH please remember that it was us oldsters who made your site successful.
At age 50, I'm not sure if I'd be considered a youngster or an oldster, but our site statistics indicate that more than 55% of traffic to our site is from mobile devices. For me, personally, this an irritating development, and I nearly always use a desktop/laptop browser. However, we have to we aware of our audience. And given that we were being punished heavily by Google for having a site that is 'not mobile-friendly' (which was really hurting us in several ways) we decided we need to make a change. But at every step of the way during the redesign, I'm making sure that I can still do things reasonably easily using a regular computer/browser. But everyone's different, and when it's just two of us, we cannot always predict how people will react to changes, hence our request for construct feedback. :-)
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
-Mike
