I wanted to take a minute to welcome you to NorthEastMMA, which is basically an upgrade to our old site, MassMMA.net.  Before I get into the changes to the site, I wanted to make sure to let you all know you’re in the right place because I can actually get some pretty cool stats on the back end of the site that tell me how people are finding us…and it looks like at least 10-20 people a day google MassMMA, or something similar like MassMMA.net, MA MMA…you get the point.

That got me thinking…I bet there are a bunch of confused people who tried to go to their favorite (and most amazing) website, only to stumble across what HAS TO BE a mistake…”What is this NorthEastMMA BS, and why do I keep getting sent there when I type www.massmma.net into my browser??!!” Well, in case you didn’t figure it out, we changed the name of the site, changed the look of the site, and added some features to it, but it’s still pretty much the same site, and it will still have the same contributing writers and all that…and the reason you wind up here instead of massmma.net is because we have that site forwarding here now…makes sense, right? We were able to migrate all the content over, so it should all be here. I have noticed some articles that had their format a little messed up in the transition (like the rankings that I had to fix the other day) but I’m working on making sure it all functions properly.

So, as far as the changes go…we’re still going to cover the events, same as always, but my goal is to cover any and all MMA shows in this area, and we hope to expand the coverage to NJ as well. The more MMA, the better, right? We also moved our upcoming events to their own page, and the calendar is pretty slick. You can look at all the events for a particular month at once, and it you run your mouse over an event, you get the details…and in some cases a direct link to the promotion’s website. We also have a simple contact form which will come right to me…our old site listed our email addresses and people would email the wrong person about something, or it’d get stuck in Spam folders…not anymore. It comes right to me and if it’s meant for someone else, I forward it right over.

The School Locator is also pretty slick. It doesn’t include all the local schools yet, but we’re working on it. You can now type in your address and it will tell you what schools are the closest, and allow you to get directions through google maps…and like the events, in some cases you can click right through to the school’s page.

Another slick feature we plan to add in the VERY near future is the web store. I used to get a ton of emails from guys wanting to get t-shirts, and I had no way to do that online..so I had to tell them to catch me at a show, or head up to Boston Brawler…pretty soon, you’ll be able to get a NorthEastMMA shirt online, and possibly other NorthEastMMA stuff. You know you want to, all the cool kids are doing it.

We also posted some RSS feeds on the right hand column of the site…for those of you who don’t know what that is, there are a bunch of links to articles on UFC.com, mmajunkie.com (my favorite site, next to this one of course) and joelauzon.com. If a new article goes up on any of those sites, it updates here…so when you stop in to read the latest comments, or articles, you can see whether or not those sites have anything updated that you need to check out.

If you have any suggestions as to what would make things easier or more fun for you, fill out a contact form and let me know. Thanks again for checking us out.