Monday, January 01, 2007

What's Up with NACA?

The North American Chess Association website appears quite defunct. Their blog has not been updated since October. The scroll on the main page promises some things in the future, but the site has been up (off and on) for six months and has only deteriorated in quality, not improved. There are also large portions of the members area in an "under construction" state (complete with the pseudo-Latin filler text used by web designers). I wrote a review July 25 where I talked about some very promising articles on the site. Not only have there been no additions, but the articles I mention in my review are no longer on the site, even for members. As paid membership is required to access the site beginning today, I suggest that visitors take a watch and wait approach.... More evidence that organizations should not go online with a new site until everything is ready.

5 comments:

The Closet Grandmaster said...

Hey man! I thought you retired from blogging. Anyway, your blog (and mine) got a mention in the latest issue of Chess Today.

- TCG

Michael Goeller said...

Yeah, the "hiatus" thing just was not working for me... If both chess and blogging are addictions, then the combination would have to be the chess equivalent of crack cocaine. Witness the return of The Chess Mind. He was probably getting the shakes.

Thanks for letting me know about Chess Today. But I've seen no spike in traffic. Either they did not provide a live link or their audience is too small to notice.

North American Chess Association said...

The publication material has been placed back up and we are re-utilizing our blog.

We've have a number of technical issues as we were porting to a new hosting provider, changing the skins on the site, and changing around some site navigation.

As stated on our blog, until we get things down consistently and all of our services are rolledo out, we will not be charging any membership.

We forsee having all services rolled out by the end of 2007 if not sooner so all of the content that we do place up there will be free of charge.

Good Chess to All,

Sevan A. Muradian
North American Chess Association

Anonymous said...

I agree 110%. Site building is so rudimentary anymore. Just hire a highschool kid to do it for you :)

If you're going to take so long to finish you should hide the site until it's ready. Nothing is more annoying than a site that is 'under construction'. BTW, I still can't find the elusive material you talked about in July.

Anonymous said...

Scott (and others):

If you log into the Members Only section (assuming you have registered) you will see a menu on your left side that says Publications.

Click on that - and you will see in the middle of screen there the links to the 2 e-mags that were put out.

Download them, unzip them, and then you can read them with Adobe Acrobat.

If you have any problems please email me.