Help Us Build The Next Brewer Fanatic - Let Us Know Your Thoughts

[Brock Beauchamp]

This website is getting a little long in the tooth. The basic design dates back to 2021, when our only site was Twins Daily. Since that redesign, we've added nine (!!!!) sites and crammed in more new features than we can count.

It's time for a ground-up rethink of everything about this website, and we need your help to do it right.

A lot has changed over the past half-decade, especially for independent publishers like us: social media has throttled our reach to near-zero, Google is replacing search results with AI summaries, and economic uncertainties continue to loom over us all.

As a result, we're focusing inward and doubling down on community. We offer more interactivity than ever before; we want to offer the best comments, forums, and user blogs you'll find anywhere. Features like the You're The GM! offseason tool will gain more prominence, and new features are coming that expand upon that idea. At the center of everything we do is you, the user. 

We only know how we use the website; your experience could differ in very important ways. That's why it's important to let us know how you use the site and how we can do things better. We can't improve without input, and yours is vital to the next generation of DiamondCentric sites.

As always, thank you for being such an important part of our community!

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[CheezWizHed]

I noticed that I'm getting a lot of "Reviewing the Brew" articles on Chrome when I open a new browser window.  Google puts a list of articles that "I may be interested in" below my search bar and pinned shortcuts.  This is besides the fact that BF is one of my pinned shortcuts.  I read a lot of BF articles and BrewCrewBall articles, but none of them ever show up there.  Maybe RTB is advertising with Google to push their articles... because it isn't because I regularly go there. 

Just an observation / idea if you are struggling to get traffic. 

[Brock Beauchamp]

7 minutes ago, CheezWizHed said:

I noticed that I'm getting a lot of "Reviewing the Brew" articles on Chrome when I open a new browser window.  Google puts a list of articles that "I may be interested in" below my search bar and pinned shortcuts.  This is besides the fact that BF is one of my pinned shortcuts.  I read a lot of BF articles and BrewCrewBall articles, but none of them ever show up there.  Maybe RTB is advertising with Google to push their articles... because it isn't because I regularly go there. 

Just an observation / idea if you are struggling to get traffic. 

So on chrome when you open a new tab, the recommended articles are dominated by RTB? Want to be clear I’m understanding the situation.

And our traffic here is good, better than most of our other sites. It’s just that the tech giants have turned the publishing market toxic. Their behavior has been abhorrent, frankly. We’ve been given a fast lesson in never relying on anyone but ourselves because corporate behemoths are vile. 

[duewizard]

For example, if I search "Brewers news" the sites appear in the following order:

mlb.com, sportspyder, Reviewing the Brew, Brew Crew Ball, Sports Illustrated, Brewers' Twitter account, Yahoo, espn and THEN Brewer Fanatic

[CheezWizHed]

14 minutes ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

So on chrome when you open a new tab, the recommended articles are dominated by RTB? Want to be clear I’m understanding the situation.

And our traffic here is good, better than most of our other sites. It’s just that the tech giants have turned the publishing market toxic. Their behavior has been abhorrent, frankly. We’ve been given a fast lesson in never relying on anyone but ourselves because corporate behemoths are vile. 

I get a variety of news articles, sports articles, etc... but the MLB articles are RTB (75%)or MLB.com (25%). They are never BF or BCB...which Google knows I read. Now, I have clicked on those links occasionally to see the article, but I rarely go to RTB otherwise. 

[Brock Beauchamp]

32 minutes ago, duewizard said:

For example, if I search "Brewers news" the sites appear in the following order:

mlb.com, sportspyder, Reviewing the Brew, Brew Crew Ball, Sports Illustrated, Brewers' Twitter account, Yahoo, espn and THEN Brewer Fanatic

Our google traffic is decent. It could be better, and I'm going to take a look at the tech side during this redesign, but our content is also NOT written around SEO as it often it with those platforms you just listed (other than MLB.com, they just have massive authority on the subject). And we won't be writing to SEO any time soon, I've always believed that's short-sighted, and given how google is screwing publishers right now, that approach is proving correct.

[Samurai Bucky]

4 hours ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

Our google traffic is decent. It could be better, and I'm going to take a look at the tech side during this redesign, but our content is also NOT written around SEO as it often it with those platforms you just listed (other than MLB.com, they just have massive authority on the subject). And we won't be writing to SEO any time soon, I've always believed that's short-sighted, and given how google is screwing publishers right now, that approach is proving correct.

I have noticed an increase in SE hits, FYI.

[nate82]

If you build a trade value thingy it may bring more traffic.  Just sayin 

[igor67]

Well if it's a rebuilding year we could probably trade North Side Baseball for some prospects...

[Frisbee Slider]

2 hours ago, nate82 said:

If you build a trade value thingy it may bring more traffic.  Just sayin 

Every top 30 prospect has infinite value and recommends not making the trade. It probably would be very easy to code. 🙂

[Frisbee Slider]

A simple daily in-season game, ‘pick to click’ and it keeps track  of whose picks performed best throughout the season. A leaderboard. Choose one Brewers player per game. 🤷‍♂️

[Brock Beauchamp]

11 hours ago, Frisbee Slider said:

A simple daily in-season game, ‘pick to click’ and it keeps track  of whose picks performed best throughout the season. A leaderboard. Choose one Brewers player per game. 🤷‍♂️

This is actually something we've been talking about for a couple of years. Implementation and scope is the sticking point, and then we got close enough to this redesign that we had to temporarily shelve it. But expect to see this at some point.

[ClosetBrewerFan]

It would be cool to have a wiki page for each prospect.  Where users could add specific details on the player, such as ratings (FV, grades), what types of pitches they throw, how hard they throw, present injury status and updates.  That info would be overwhelming for the staff to maintain (especially for each prospect) but would not be too hard for a community to do, particularly with this one that has so many minor league gurus.  That info is all available within the forums but just not in any one place for each prospect. Maybe even link or pull in statistics onto the page automatically.

Alternatively or in addition, just improving the search function would be helpful.  If you search on a name it will give you hundreds (thousands) of hits many from the same thread. Which i understand why but it has no intelligence to filter out redundant/duplicate info. Not sure how I would make it better but I have found its pretty much an unusable feature of the forums. 

[Brock Beauchamp]

36 minutes ago, ClosetBrewerFan said:

It would be cool to have a wiki page for each prospect.  Where users could add specific details on the player, such as ratings (FV, grades), what types of pitches they throw, how hard they throw, present injury status and updates.  That info would be overwhelming for the staff to maintain (especially for each prospect) but would not be too hard for a community to do, particularly with this one that has so many minor league gurus.  That info is all available within the forums but just not in any one place for each prospect. Maybe even link or pull in statistics onto the page automatically.

Alternatively or in addition, just improving the search function would be helpful.  If you search on a name it will give you hundreds (thousands) of hits many from the same thread. Which i understand why but it has no intelligence to filter out redundant/duplicate info. Not sure how I would make it better but I have found its pretty much an unusable feature of the forums. 

We actually have exactly this, but we haven't been able to get people to use it so we basically abandoned the project.

https://brewerfanatic.com/milwaukee-brewers-players-project/

[ClosetBrewerFan]

3 hours ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

We actually have exactly this, but we haven't been able to get people to use it so we basically abandoned the project.

https://brewerfanatic.com/milwaukee-brewers-players-project/

Well, dont I feel dumb.  I guess I need to start a page then 😄

[Michael Trzinski]

On 8/28/2026 at 9:20 AM, Brock Beauchamp said:

We actually have exactly this, but we haven't been able to get people to use it so we basically abandoned the project.

https://brewerfanatic.com/milwaukee-brewers-players-project/

Sadly for me. I enjoyed writing the bios.