As one of the first goat related web sites online during the DOT.COM boom in the late 90’s, we originally started the site using the basic coding skills present at the time. Well now after almost 25 years, there are going to be some format changes to get things into the 21st century.

While we try each year to do some kind of updating or change the look of things, we begin to realize how much content there is nested into the site, and how difficult it is to try and do it all at once. So this time around we are starting from square one and are concentrated on a section by section approach.

 

We began GoatWorld with the concept of “Buy-Sell-Share-Learn-Teach-Care” and for the most part, the original concept will stay true. However, the focus will be more with the intent to provide essential livestock products through the GoatWorld Livestock Products Store which will occupy the front page of the site. We rely upon our weekly sales of various products, and infrequent advertising to fund the continued operation of the site. We’ve had some great advertisers over the years, but with so many social media sites now available since we started out in 1999, advertising has really taken a nose dive.

 

Our advertising program will largely be discontinued except in certain circumstances where longterm advertising or sponsorship would be beneficial to both GoatWorld and the advertiser/sponsor. We turn down a lot of “guest posts and articles” for the mere fact that they 99% of the time have no relation to goats or even livestock in general. Which brings me to the next change on its way…

As the site name GoatWorld implies, our focus has been on just that: goats. However, the GoatWorld site is also akin to SheepWorld.com which points directly to GoatWorld itself. It may sound confusing but what this means is that we will ultimately expand our reach to sheep as well as other classes of livestock such as horses, llamas, poultry, and even a cow or two. Since the GoatWorld Livestock Products Store offers many products that are multi-species, it seems the logical choice.

For many years we offered a number of features like a chat room and a message forum but again, with the advent of social media, these type of features quickly became outdated and really are no longer useful to the scope of the site. They were primarily intended to offer a method of quick help for persons having health difficulties with the goats. For security reasons and with many social media sites monitoring every word you write, I’m reluctant to do away entirely with the chat room, but there are safer and secure methods that if a person needs the quick help I spoke of, they can just as easily call me (encouraged) rather than spending precious time writing to seek help.

Speaking of help, I know that many people over the years have found our GoatWorld Articles section to be very useful. This section will remain intact for the time being. There are quite a number of web sites that have directly linked or referenced these articles on GoatWorld, so changing their location on the server would also affect the cross linking. I will make edits, updates and various changes to these pages as I progress so they don’t return a page not found error for these other sites.

In closing I will mention that I’ve tried a number of strategies over the past two decades to keep GoatWorld relevant to the industry. My most recent attempt at providing fresh, daily goat related headlines and news articles became a very tedious effort and actually drove site visitation data down. At this time in our lives and from what I’ve observed with how people utilize the site, the GoatWorld Livestock Products Store is really going to be where we need to be focused for the long run.

Gary Pfalzbot, GoatWorld

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