Although some aircraft were pretty sleek and cool as the new millennia arrived (such as the handsome Thundergull with developer Mark Bierle flying), a host of new brands descended upon aviation. Today you know them; in 2004, not so much.
For thirteen years, ByDanJohnson.com has served the light aircraft community, covering Light-Sport Aircraft, light kit-built aircraft, and ultralight aircraft. Along the way, we’ve covered all manner of interesting light aircraft from the tiniest drones to the emerging new-style certified GA aircraft from producers of LSA. As my outgoing webmaster said, “It’s been quite a ride!”
Of, course, since ByDanJohnson.com has been live for 13 years (almost to the day, which will be April 1st, 2017), this website preceded social media and even giants like YouTube. The website you have been so loyally visiting was assembled using the fairly crude tools available at the beginning of this new millennia. However, now that we are 17 years into the new century, it is time for a change… a BIG change.
In just a few days, after we check and recheck, adjust and tweak, we will hit the button for our “beta launch” of an entirely new look and feel.
As BDJ1.0 launched back in April of 2004, we had aircraft like this Drifter on Lotus amphib floats (flown by gurus Phil Lockwood and Jeff Hudson) powered by the two-stroke Rotax 582.
To be perfectly honest, this is making me a little nervous.
Most humans, myself included, are not always comfortable with change. While the new look — which new webmaster Russell Kasselman (of Iron Dog Media) and I abbreviate as “BDJ2.0” — will contain all the material you want most but it will not be 100% complete when it launches.
Oh, don’t worry. BDJ2.0 will have all the news and video you have come to love in the last few years since video swaggered onto the stage. We definitely will get every aspect of the old site ported over to the new during the month of March. By our “grand launch” — hopefully by the April 1st 13th anniversary of the original website — you should find everything you ever sought on the old site.
Back in 2006, I traveled to Connecticut to fly an old favorite — the Flightstar II powered by a four-stroke HKS — with a longtime friend in the business, Tom Peghiny. My smile shows how I felt about it.
Indeed, we’ll have some new features you never saw before… such as an easy comments section. It should be easier to navigate. Plus, most importantly for you — and for Google, used for more than 90% of all web searches* — BDJ2.0 will be fully “responsive” to mobile devices. It should look good on your big screen desktop, laptop, or TV. It will work nicely on your iPad or other tablet. Additionally, billions of smartphones will also be able to use BDJ2.0 as they never could on BDJ1.0. Here in 2017, we understand about two-thirds of all ByDanJohnson.com visits come from smartphones.
But BDJ2.0 will be different to use. I hope you will tell us what you like or don’t like. We do this for you so we want it to work well. With literally millions of words, more than 100,000 images, thousands of articles, and hundreds of videos, plus one-of-a-kind features like PlaneFinder 2.0, our popular SLSA List, our resource-rich FIRM List, LSA Market Info, and the most informative advertisements you can find anywhere in aviation… (whew!) it has been been a major undertaking. We’ve been at this for 18 months and, truly, the work is never really done because the world of tech changes even faster than the world of affordable aviation.
Please stay with us as the “great ride” continues. I so sincerely appreciate each and every visitor. We love what we do and we hope it shows!
* Google’s vaunted page ranking system highly values websites that are “responsive” but 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 BDJ2.0.
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