Posted on November 5, 2013
by realpokermd
Welcome to the new and improved SharkScopers. It’s much like the old sharkScopers, but simpler, cleaner, and more refined. We’ve freshened the site up on both the front end and the back end, so you’ll see some visual changes and new features as well. Here’s an outline of what’s new:
Communication and Comments
One of the areas I really wanted to improve on is communication/comments. The SharkScopers forums now have their own unique design, so the lines between forums and blogs are no longer blurred. We made the forum posts wider, increased the size of the user information on posts, and added an optional comment subject.
For the blogs, news, and videos, we found that many of the comments needed individual attention from the author of the post. To make this easier, we set up threaded comments. Now, when you reply to a specific comment, your reply will show up indented below that comment. Try it out!
Navigation
SharkScopers has a lot of content! We have users, forums, blogs, news, videos, and more coming soon (coaching and competitions, to name a few). On one hand, we don’t want to overwhelm new visitors with endless menus, but, at the same time, we want everything to be easily found. This was a tricky area to tackle, but I believe we’ve reached a good solution.
Each section now has it’s own menu on top of it. So, for example, if you’re viewing a news page, there’s menu items for SharkScope news, SharkScopers news, and all news. Each user also has their own menu now. If you’re viewing one of fultip777’s videos, you’ll see his avatar and that he’s an instructor. You’ll also see links for his profile, blog, videos, (and coaching details in the future).
Further refinements in this area will continue to be rolled out over the next few weeks.
Design
My goal is to under-design SharkScopers, keeping it clean, simple, and light weight. Less gradients, less drop-shadows, less colors, and less attention grabbing flashy things, means you can focus more on what’s important — the content. Keeping design simple, with a solid foundation, will also keep SharkScopers flexible for future change.
New video from PimpinDonks
Along with all of the new upgrades, we’ve also posted a new training video from PimpinDonks. If you’ve been following his blog, PimpinDonks set up and ran a live poker training group, consisting of SharkScopers members. Over the course of a few weeks, his students have made more then $30,000! Using the members of his training group as an example, PimpinDonks’ latest video teaches you how to play when you’re faced with a table full of sharks. If you’re a PimpinDonks fan, or you haven’t unlocked any videos yet, this video is a must have.
More to come
In the short-run, you might notice a few features missing from the previous version of the site. This may be on purpose or because we haven’t had a chance to integrate them yet. Over the next few days we’ll still need to do a few tweaks and modifications, but nothing major that would require the site to be taken down.
In the long run, we will continue working to build SharkScopers into the best community of its kind. Coaching, accepting new instructors and videos, running promotions for members, and further integrating with SharkScope is on the list of priorities.
And in closing, I want to give a big thanks to everyone who’s been actively participating in the community during our beta/early stage. All this work I’ve outlined above is only to provide the community platform. You guys are the ones who shape the site and push it forward.