Great Lakes Bass Fishing Forum

Don't know when they 'flipped the switch' but today I found the Michigan DNR website to be complete new. Appears to finally be their attempt to be mobile-friendly. Looks like they are also using a lazyload method for the new pages on mobile devices, and mega menus.

It looks better than it did before, but I'm finding the old links to real pages no longer work, which will be a big pain for the zillions of websites that have shared links to specific pages... including me?? It appears they have changed all of the old links to new links. I'm not finding any redirects in place either to take an 'old' link and forward it to the 'new' link for the 'same' page?? I would hope they will eventually have this in place or a ton of old links will not just end up on the MDNR home page at www.michigan.gov/dnr (http://www.michigan.gov/dnr) - yuck! I sure hope their search engine works a lot better than the old one did?? People will have to use it to find all of the old pages at their new links now...

What is most odd to me - I've always felt they have the strangest URL's in the world possibly with all the commas, numbers, dashes (even multiple dashes in a row) and underscores. I'm not sure I can think of any other website I've ever been to that uses commas in a URL?!?

I would hope and assume that they at least made sure all of their existing shortcuts still work? I tried a few like the one to the information about the MFTIS (www.michigan.gov/fishingtournaments (http://www.michigan.gov/fishingtournaments)) and they worked. But losing all those old links to specific pages is a pain in the butt! Maybe they'll fix that eventually as I said...?

Wow that does look different.   I see there are over 1300 bass tournaments scheduled so far.   

For some reason I thought we were already way past that number? Might be mixing up my years again...

I did hear back from the Fisheries Division 'website' person. She confirms what I already know - most or all links have changed. She has offered to provide me shortcut links for pages I routinely send people to but I'm imaging many pages are too far 'into' the website to have a shortcut link. Told her I give making a list a try in a couple weeks (after the Bassmaster Classic).

Wish they had thought of redirection links and had created a way to do that... changing all your links really messes up important things like backlinks, link credits and SEARCH ENGINES!! I would expect without redirects that they take a huge hit from Google for having so many 'broken' search engine links!?! Every search engine result I tried right now related to Fisheries all ends up at the MDNR home page... maybe I should offer some SEO services to them?? ;D