A year and a half of planning, adjusting, and engineering have resulted in the pages you see now. We hope you like it and it will only get better. Image thanks to Shark designer, Jaro Dostal
You could call it thirteen years in the making. More pragmatically, ByDanJohnson.com has now caught up with the mobile revolution. Welcome to ByDanJohnson.com 2.0 (or, for short, “BDJ2”). We hope you’ll like the changes — and will not be temporarily frustrated with the differences from the old “BDJ1” site — because even more changes are on the way.
You may not believe it looks too different… and if so, that’s good. We tried to keep most of the look and feel even while making the website much more mobile-friendly, or “responsive” in the parlance of tech folks. With two thirds of our website visitors coming via their smartphone, the site is mainly different in how well it accommodates whatever modern device is used to view the articles, videos, and more.
Here are a few website user notes…
(1) All current members (those who help us provide this content by contributing $29 a year) or registered visitors (those leaving an email address) will have to reset their password. You may be used to this on other updated websites. That’s because a change of servers and web platforms demands it.
(2) Search will soon add an “advanced” feature to help you look through our enormous database to find more specific information. For now, Search finds any reference to the letters you type. This will get you most of what you are seeking. Like new smartphone software, we’ll keep making improvements. Since we refer to the project as BDJ2, I guess it will be BDJ2.1… BDJ2.2, and so on.
(3) Some pages are not complete as of this “beta launch.” Those include PlaneFinder 2.0, LSA Market Info, and others. We’ll get to them as quickly as we can, however…
Under the shiny cowling is a ton of detail that most folks never see. While we tweak and adjust we hope you’ll bear with us.
(4) In a few days, my new webmaster and I will be heading off to Sun ‘n Fun like so many others and we have more work to do to prepare, so please bear with us. We are committed to make this website the best in light aviation and we will work hard to assure your longtime loyalty is rewarded with a better visitor experience.
(5) Search engines like Google, Bing, and the rest place very high value on websites that are “responsive” as this website now is. However, since we are launching a fresh site based on new servers, our ranking may suffer for a short period. In days or weeks, we think we will regain our high position on a Google search once their robots have thoroughly scoured BDJ2. Again, we ask you to bear with us. It’s gonna get better and better!
Despite wrenching on every nook and cranny of this large website, one thing has not changed. Our mission is to serve the light aircraft community, covering Light-Sport Aircraft, light kit-built aircraft, and ultralight aircraft. We believe we do this better than anyone else, not because we are so great but we because we have always maintained a laser-tight focus. We absolutely will keep our eye on affordable aviation.
We have transferred literally millions of words, tens of thousands of images, thousands of articles, and hundreds of videos plus the most informative advertisements you can find anywhere in aviation.
We love what we do and we hope it shows!
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