Greetings everyone, Sorry I've been a bit out of touch. Two weeks of travel in the last 23 days, (from So. Cal, to Hawaii, then a break, then Washington D.C. But I got a lot of work done (and some play). I'm back for a good 10 days, then off to Infocomm, where I expect some interesting home theater projector announcements. But more on that in the next blog or two.
Projector Reviews, you may have noticed, has a "new" homepage. Or rather, the new homepage is based on the homepage we were running several years, until
we tried out the recent one using panes, just this past January.
I'm pleased to say that our now current homepage has been updated. It's better organized than before, and makes things easier to find than the old one from January. In addition all the new specialty landing pages (1080p projectors, 3D projectors, and a dozen or so more), that were launched in the last 6 months, still remain, providing you with additional information and ways to navigate. Each of those provides links to reviews of related projectors.
Before I go further, a quick note on two upcoming reviews: I now have in house two home theater projectors - very different ones, for review. The first is the BenQ W1200, a 1080p projector with a low price point, and plenty of lumens. I fired that one up for the first time two nights ago. You know how I'm a sucker for a nice bright image. Bingo! One of the basketball playoff games, was "brilliant". But more when I do the usual "first look - review" in a few days.
The second one I haven't unboxed, but Mike picked it up yesterday to take it back and measure it. It's the Runco LS-5, a single chip 1080p DLP projector claiming 754 ANSI lumens at D65 for home theater, and 1000 lumens maximum. This Runco, like all the others, is only available through Runco authorized and trained local dealers. Should be interesting!
Back to being a Pane!
Why did we go back to the old style? Afterall, panes are getting pretty popular. They areextensively used in iPad (and I assume, android) apps, so we thought we'd give it a try. We hit two major snags though:
First problem, the way our page was designed, the panes work very poorly on iPads. That's a secondary problem however.
The big pain with panes on our site, is that google, it seems didn't like them very much at all, at least the way we implemented them. Since switching, we've seen a drop in where we rank on their search engine. We don't know why, but it was significant enough of a drop, resulting in our first situation in years, (these last 3 months) where our traffic dropped, compared to a year earlier. Thus we were compelled to do something about it. We've only seen a small drop, but that's not a trend we want to see continuing.
So, with the new "old" homepage back, we're hoping to see a change in direction for our rankings, and the start of a return to our previous traffic volume glory. BTW, the drops haven't been dramatic (aka disasterous), but enough to raise serious concern. If all goes well, we'll see a shift in the patterns over the next few weeks.
Not all panes, may be as painful. Once this is solved, we are still looking at a complete redesign of the homepage for the fall. In fact I expect we will use one or two panes, but much smaller ones, and not try to cram multiple pages into one homepage using them. I think that was the real problem with our first attempt. OK, that's the story for now.
Look for my blog about the new projectors later today.. -art
