From stand-alone GPSr to mobile, the new geocaching.com homepage

While Groundspeak was upgrading the geocaching.com homepage, I was reading this article. The author is of the opinion that ‘Geocaching.com may not look as polished as its main rival’ (referring to opencaching). I already disagree with this opinion on the old geocaching.com homepage, I wonder what the author thinks about the new homepage.

First thing that caught my eye on the new homepage, is the ‘Go Geocaching with your smartphone’ line in the top right corner. Yes, it says smartphone, not GPSr. Spending 100€ on a GPSr is no longer needed to start geocaching. A smartphone, which you probably already have, is good enough. As I already said last year, Groundspeak is looking for ways to infect more people with the Geocaching virus. And these 5 words, ‘Go geocaching with your smartphone’, will take geocaching to the masses. You no longer need to go to a (web)shop spent 100€ and figure out how to operate your new toy. The largest hurdle is gone. People are looking for the coolest apps for their smartphone, and a treasure hunting app would perfectly fit in that category.

Second thing that caught my eye, is that the new homepage is so much more starter friendly. The old homepage was perfect for existing users with quick links to 'your profile' and the 'hide & seek a cache page'. For newbies the old homepage was hell. In the new design, Groundspeak kept the quick links to ‘your profile’ and ‘hide and seek a cache’ and added starter friendliness. The new homepage explains with a nice picture what geocaching is, there are multiple links to the start guide, explaining geocaching in more detail and there is the link to make your smartphone geocaching ready. From the old homepage, you had to go through hell and back to get the same information and get started. This new homepage is a huge improvement for starters.

Another remarkable thing that is promoted to the homepage is the ‘local organisations’ link under ‘community’. This is a big appreciation from Groundspeak for the work the local organisation have done. Groundspeak is seeing the importance of the local organisations for themselves and the geocaching community. Local organisations pick up everything groundspeak can not do themselves. Besides keeping relations with land managers, bringing local geocachers together on a forum and by organising events, local organisations are the innovators of new functionality of the geocaching.com website. They have the lean organisation needed to quickly build innovative new functionality and they are less dependent on their relatively small user base. So if new functionality fails, it is not such a big deal as it is for groundspeak.

Last but not least is that the new site design is mobile friendly. The menu on the left hand side was killing for mobile devices with small screens. Now the full width of the screen can be used to view the information you want to view. And as said before in this post, mobile devices are the future.

Yes, I like the new geocaching.com homepage a lot. It has opened the door to the new geocaching era of smartphones but also left wide open the door to the traditional era of the GPSr, as it should be. I am looking forward to the cache hiding creativity of the newbies with their smartphones but I think the smartphone is not yet ready to replace the ruggedized stand alone GPSr’s for more frequent geocaching. The new geocaching.com homepage fits that suit perfectly.