For those of you who don’t have an hour of free time to rewatch my session from Insight, I wanted to quickly review the changes that have gone into the new SlopeFillers site, content direction, and concept.

Here’s a recap.

1) More Stories
I’ve recently realized that SlopeFillers are not things, they’re people. Videos do not fill slopes, marketers use video to fill slopes. So, from here on out, the most prominent content on this site is content about you, the marketers.

Within the site’s navigation, these are stories.

2) Different Post Sizes
Aside from that, posts will be similar to how they’ve always but with one exception: posts will be less similar to one another than they’ve been in the past. Instead of 500 words, some maybe 100 words about one small bit of content. In the past, this didn’t fit the style of content I was putting out. Now, they’re fair game. I was saying “no” to too much good content simply because I didn’t have 500 words to say about it.

Within the site’s navigation, these are insights.

3) Jobs More Prominent
One of the most popular pages on this site is the job board. All I’ve done here is give it a little more visibility within the site and the weekly digest.

4) Golf Topics on Their Own Site
SlopeFillers worked in large part because it was focused on one topic: ski resort marketing. Golf is a sport I know, believe there’s a lot to learn from, and a business many ski resorts are in for multiple months a year. So being, I’ve created a separate home for that content focused solely on golf; FairwayFillers.

5) No Set Posting Schedule
This is a big one. Because content will be spread across these two sites and for other reasons, I’m taking a break from the M-W-F posting schedule. This means that some weeks will have 4-5 posts and, yes, others may only have 1-2.

6) Simplicity
But the theme on that last one I alluded to is simplicity. I’m simplifying these visually so it’s easier to design for. I’m simplifying my content schedule so I have the flexibility to work on bigger ideas instead of feeling pressure to deliver posts. I’m simplifying the code behind the site so it takes significantly less time to update and iterate.

7) Rankings Only
That simplicity extends to the rankings. I’ve taken the most popular pieces of the dashboards – rankings and top content – combined them with a popular content series – “best of” content lists – and turned them into one, easy-to-maintain interface.

The common themes here, as I outlined in my session are simply this:

• People: tell the stories of the real SlopeFillers.
• Simplicity: less overhead, same benefits.
• Community: give non-ski folks a place to call home.

That said, I would love to hear your feedback on each of these changes. Love them? Hate them? Speak up. Really. I’m humbled by the support I’ve received for my well-meaning but ultimately imperfect efforts, and appreciate your support and feedback no matter if you agree with the changes or not.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.