Friday, January 21, 2005
Welcome to the new Pocket PC Thoughts Design
Posted by Jason Dunn in "UPDATE" @ 05:35 PM
I'm pleased to announce that after many weeks of work and tweaking, our new template is ready - and you're looking at it! I'm immensely proud of the work that Fabrizio and our team have done on this new template, and I firmly believe this new template will allow us to grow and become an even better site. Here are the three main factors that shaped our thinking in developing this template:
FASTER PERFORMANCE & REDUCED SERVER LOAD: As our traffic continued to grow (1.14 million visitors in December alone) we were faced with the ugly reality that the design and functionality we had created didn't scale very well as more and more people hit the server. We've struggled with finding the right balance between useful features and a fast, stable server. The new home page is considerably faster than our previous version - there's 50% less HTML code, we've used a lot of CSS, and still managed to add new features. We've also reduced the total number of graphics on the home page, and focused on making everything as light and fast as possible. Here's the down side: in order to keep things fast and stable, we've had to remove the ability for subscribers to customize the number of front page news items.
That's not a decision I made lightly, because I deeply value the support subscribers give us, but it was a severe performance hit on our server to dynamically generate a custom page for each subscriber. This was even harder for our server when some of the more zealous subscribers maxed out the settings, loading 30 posts on the front page and delving back 30 days. ;-) By fixing the number of posts on the home page, we take a lot of pressure off our server, which means it will be fast and stable for everyone, subscribers and non-subscribers alike. We've retained all other subscriber customizations - you can turn off/on ads, adjust the columns on the right side, etc. We're also going to think about (and are open to suggestions for) new subscriber customizations...ones that won't kill our server. :mrgreen:
ENHANCED CONTENT EXPOSURE: One of the complaints I've heard many times over the past two years is that there's so much content flowing on our home page, if you miss a day or two it's hard to find what you've missed. Also, our home page could get to be massive in size with ten full posts - with a few animated GIFs in posts we'd easily hit 600K to 900K. To combat both of these problems, we've reduced the number of full posts to five. That gives repeat visitors roughly 12-18 hours worth of posts (depending on the day) without any clicking to sub-pages. Posts beyond the five full are listed in a format showing the headline and the number of comments - we list seven days worth of posts, so we're giving you access to more content before having to go back into the archives.
In the upper right corner we have a news feed from Digital Media Thoughts and Smartphone Thoughts - I've heard many times from people who didn't realize we even had those sites. This news feed will remind you those sites exist, and you'll be kept in the loop on the news they're publishing. And you'll click to read them right? Right? ;-)
Our awesome review team continues to crank out some of the best reviews around, and I wanted a way to highlight their work and keep the "once a week" visitors up to date with recent articles. We've also cleaned up and centralized our navigation structure, while still adding much-needed navigation elements. There are now new ways for you to interact with the content - a permanent link to easily find articles again, a printing function to get hard copy, and an "email to a friend" function for you to pass on interesting stories to others. The layout has been kept at 800 x 600 resolution, which wasn't easy, but Fabrizio did a fantastic job of taking all our ideas and putting them into place.
MARKETABILITY: Pocket PC Thoughts is a business for me (Thoughts Media Inc. is my full-time job), so like any good business person I have to make sure we're doing the right things to stay in business. One of the realities of the current advertising market is that most businesses don't want to buy 468 x 60 banners - they're too small. And if I can't sell banners, I can't keep running the site. It was a pretty easy decision when you get right down to it. ;-) So we've gotten rid of that small size and replaced it with a 728 x 90 leader board - it's a dominant position on the page, and when you click on it and check out what our sponsor is offering, you help us out immensely. I'm going to write up a full explanation of how the online advertising world works later, but I will say that I've said no to some very well-paying types of advertising (pop-ups, pop-unders, full page flash ads) because I personally dislike it when sites I visit get too aggressive with advertising. So if you dislike the new 728 x 90 ad, just remember it could be much worse. :lol: Keep clicking those ads and buying from our sponsors - we appreciate it!
Ultimately I realize that, just like the last time we changed our layout, some people don't like change. I'm open to feedback, but please understand this change was necessary, and no change was made lightly - we thought long and hard about everything we altered. We're not completely finished either - expect to see subtle enhancements to the front page over the coming months, new article templates, and new forum templates.
Special thanks to Fabrizio Fiandanese for his awesome and mostly volunteer design/development work, and to the people whom I showed this to and gave us valuable feedback. Your ideas were appreciated.
FASTER PERFORMANCE & REDUCED SERVER LOAD: As our traffic continued to grow (1.14 million visitors in December alone) we were faced with the ugly reality that the design and functionality we had created didn't scale very well as more and more people hit the server. We've struggled with finding the right balance between useful features and a fast, stable server. The new home page is considerably faster than our previous version - there's 50% less HTML code, we've used a lot of CSS, and still managed to add new features. We've also reduced the total number of graphics on the home page, and focused on making everything as light and fast as possible. Here's the down side: in order to keep things fast and stable, we've had to remove the ability for subscribers to customize the number of front page news items.
That's not a decision I made lightly, because I deeply value the support subscribers give us, but it was a severe performance hit on our server to dynamically generate a custom page for each subscriber. This was even harder for our server when some of the more zealous subscribers maxed out the settings, loading 30 posts on the front page and delving back 30 days. ;-) By fixing the number of posts on the home page, we take a lot of pressure off our server, which means it will be fast and stable for everyone, subscribers and non-subscribers alike. We've retained all other subscriber customizations - you can turn off/on ads, adjust the columns on the right side, etc. We're also going to think about (and are open to suggestions for) new subscriber customizations...ones that won't kill our server. :mrgreen:
ENHANCED CONTENT EXPOSURE: One of the complaints I've heard many times over the past two years is that there's so much content flowing on our home page, if you miss a day or two it's hard to find what you've missed. Also, our home page could get to be massive in size with ten full posts - with a few animated GIFs in posts we'd easily hit 600K to 900K. To combat both of these problems, we've reduced the number of full posts to five. That gives repeat visitors roughly 12-18 hours worth of posts (depending on the day) without any clicking to sub-pages. Posts beyond the five full are listed in a format showing the headline and the number of comments - we list seven days worth of posts, so we're giving you access to more content before having to go back into the archives.
In the upper right corner we have a news feed from Digital Media Thoughts and Smartphone Thoughts - I've heard many times from people who didn't realize we even had those sites. This news feed will remind you those sites exist, and you'll be kept in the loop on the news they're publishing. And you'll click to read them right? Right? ;-)
Our awesome review team continues to crank out some of the best reviews around, and I wanted a way to highlight their work and keep the "once a week" visitors up to date with recent articles. We've also cleaned up and centralized our navigation structure, while still adding much-needed navigation elements. There are now new ways for you to interact with the content - a permanent link to easily find articles again, a printing function to get hard copy, and an "email to a friend" function for you to pass on interesting stories to others. The layout has been kept at 800 x 600 resolution, which wasn't easy, but Fabrizio did a fantastic job of taking all our ideas and putting them into place.
MARKETABILITY: Pocket PC Thoughts is a business for me (Thoughts Media Inc. is my full-time job), so like any good business person I have to make sure we're doing the right things to stay in business. One of the realities of the current advertising market is that most businesses don't want to buy 468 x 60 banners - they're too small. And if I can't sell banners, I can't keep running the site. It was a pretty easy decision when you get right down to it. ;-) So we've gotten rid of that small size and replaced it with a 728 x 90 leader board - it's a dominant position on the page, and when you click on it and check out what our sponsor is offering, you help us out immensely. I'm going to write up a full explanation of how the online advertising world works later, but I will say that I've said no to some very well-paying types of advertising (pop-ups, pop-unders, full page flash ads) because I personally dislike it when sites I visit get too aggressive with advertising. So if you dislike the new 728 x 90 ad, just remember it could be much worse. :lol: Keep clicking those ads and buying from our sponsors - we appreciate it!
Ultimately I realize that, just like the last time we changed our layout, some people don't like change. I'm open to feedback, but please understand this change was necessary, and no change was made lightly - we thought long and hard about everything we altered. We're not completely finished either - expect to see subtle enhancements to the front page over the coming months, new article templates, and new forum templates.
Special thanks to Fabrizio Fiandanese for his awesome and mostly volunteer design/development work, and to the people whom I showed this to and gave us valuable feedback. Your ideas were appreciated.
