Greetings,
Life is getting crazy, but I've been meaning for weeks to tell everyone, some details about the new Projector Reviews website, or should I say, redesigned and expanded.
There's a lot to tell you. The site is currently being redesigned, by a company I recently hired. Expect the new www.projectorreviews.com site should launch end of May, or June. I'm going to tell you a good bit, but the important thing is, if you would like to make suggestions, now, is the time. Wireframes of the new Projector Reviews website will finished and coding started
in a few weeks. Comment to this blog, if you would like to help us with those good suggestions!
The three aspects of the new site that are of greatest note are:
- Major new ProjectorReviews.com look and feel. The new site engine will be WordPress based, rely more heavily on graphics a great User Interface, and use of panes for showing multiple photos. These changes will help accomplish two things. No more incredibly long page swith 20, 30, 40 or more screenfuls, that are typical of current reviews. Along with this the number of banners per page (not counting the microbannes) will be only about half of current levels. So, the new site should be cleaner/less cluttered, and easier to navigate.
- Major new expansion: Smart Home Automation. Our move into this related area, will be launched with a Dream Home - connected home automation project. I figure everyone with a home projector would probably like to have it in a theater, and anyone with a theater, would like it automated - why not? And once you are automating, why not the rest of your house, as long as it's not absurdly expensive, and can save on electric and heating, and...
Thus look for our new section "Smart Home by Projector Reviews." The Smart Home will be an ongoing creation starting from an existing "pretty dumb" home, over the next 18-24 months, one project at a time. We will deal with an entire house, so when done, we'll have wireless control of most things,
via wifi and other technologies, and virtually everything will be controllable by iPhone, iPad, Android... For a taste here's one image showing the living room fixer upper we bought, shortly after we replaced the flooring (first thing we did). No, the floor, isn't "smart, but all those lights you see will be.
- Subscriber Area: We at Projector Reviews want to give you more information! We realize we have a large number of occasional or regular visitors, and also newbies (no offense) that visit regularly while shopping for their first projector. Our new subscriber area, will primarily add new content to the total, rather than take some of the content that has always been free, and put a price tag on it. Why not more info for free? Great idea, but, we are "the press", and since I know you are all internet users, you likely know well, that monetarily; the online press struggles to survive on advertising. Oh, our site traffic has almost doubled in the last four years, but advertising revenues are pretty much stuck in low gear. I need to add full time reviewer, that only a subscriber area can help pay for. Such is life, or as Robert Heinlein made famous "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch" (The phrase and the acronym are central to Robert Heinlein's 1966 science-fiction novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which popularized it) - wiki (one of my fav short SF books, a classic! -a)
That's what's up here at Projector Reviews - big picture. Now a few details about each:
To give you a "taste" of the new site, which is still in wireframe design, here's a shrunken down image of the the upper half of the homepage wireframe:
Preliminary (partial) Wireframe of Projector Reviews new homepage
Look for lots of panes for comparing images. For example, for our usual Fifth Element Starship image, now there will be the usual 420 wide image, but instead of 6-10 individual images from other projectors below it, those will be a single pane, and you can just scroll through to compare the same image, from different projectors, to the projector being reviewed. When youlick for a larger version, you'll get 2 1000 wide images across one above the other, with the image from the review projector and below it, the large image of the selected competitor. Then you can just click to change competitor images. Cool?
Next I want to tell you a bit about the subscriber area benefits. and the Smart Home, connected home - Dream Home project. But, this blog is already too long, so I'll do two more blogs - one on the new subscriber area and all the goodies it will include, and the second blog will tell you about the Smart Home Automation section and project.
And don't forget, our 2013 Home Theater Projector Comparison report will publish in the next week!
thanks! -art
TANSTAAFL!
