Changes for Girls Chase in 2013

Hey there gentlemen,

Chase Amante here. It's the start of a new year - 2013; and new things are afoot.

We'll be introducing some new, (relatively) major changes to the website that are going to both massively up the value the site's bringing to you over the course of the year, and change the way you use it for the better.

(the new Girls Chase logo)

What we have here right now is a content business - an article-based site - where the site isn't all that well-designed for finding the kinds of articles you most want. It's a blog setup, which is usable, but far from optimal.

We also have a business model that's centered on product sales, for a website that's all about the content. It's what you'd call a mismatch between what the reader comes to the site for, and what the business side of things wants to achieve (i.e., enough revenues to properly maintain and grow the site and company).

So, sometime between late-January and mid-February most likely, we'll be premiering two new things:

• A totally new, newspaper-influenced website design that's cleaner, more navigable, more readable, and yet retains enough of the old style of things that it should feel like a pretty natural transition to old hands around here (you can see a development snapshot of one of the new category pages here; obviously, nothing's complete yet, though); and

• A new, New York Times-style content subscription model, where you'll be able to access 10 articles on the main site for free per month, and you'll be asked to pay about 20 dollars per month to subscribe and keep reading if you'd like to read more than 10 articles per month

I expect there's probably a fairly wide opinion here among the regular readers about this; both about the site redesign and, likely more so, about the new content subscriptions.

Before you jump to any conclusions though, I'd like to ask you to take a walk with me (metaphorically speaking) as I discuss with you why we're making the changes we are, and what you can expect out of Girls Chase in this new year.