So a lot can change in just under 2 weeks. We got a new premium WordPress theme, a new custom plugin(the ‘Most Popular Reviews’), and a TON of functionality.
My goal was to open everything up, and below I will go into some of the major changes to the website.
Instead of making you go to the daily deals category to see what applications recently went on sale. . .now this is right on the front page(expanded), so that you can quickly scan through and find applications that you might want to buy. I put the sale price of the application before the name of the application to make it even easier to scan through. Some just want free applications, some don’t mind spending 1-2 dollars on a premium application that was just marked down. I try to keep the applications in that list to applications that are either free, or 1-2 dollars. But if a good 10-20 dollar application goes on a 50% sale, then you’ll see that there too.
There is a large portion of the audience that just wants to read application reviews. They don’t care about applications on sale but are more interested in actually finding out how an application works. Visitors can quickly check the front page(left side), and see the most recently reviewed applications. Before you would have to scroll through the entire website to see the posts. . .now this has been compacted into a widget, and you don’t have to scroll down the entire site to read them.
If you want a little more than just the title of the application, the new theme lets you scan through the front page and get an intro to the ‘featured categories’. I believe I have all of the major categories there, but if you can think of any others just let me know. This lets you see a screenshot of the application, the title, and a brief description of what it does(the first part of the review)
Sadly there is a portion of the readers that don’t like the new template. Some say it’s ‘too busy’, some say they ‘liked the blog style better’. My best suggestion for this would be to click into the ‘Free Applications’ category, and then the ‘Paid Applications’ category. You can do this by clicking the title of the widgets in the middle of the front page. This takes you to the specific categories for Free or Paid application reviews and is in the classic blog style. The only difference is that you have to go into 1 and then back out and go into the other. I hope to get a simple plugin soon that will combine both of those into 1 page. Then if you like you can just bookmark that category, and it will be similar to the old ‘blog style’.
Moving onto the new Popular Reviews plugin. I specify reviews because it only ranks posts on this website. So if it hasn’t been reviewed then it won’t show up in the lists. It’s also broken up into 2 lists. 1 for free and 1 for paid. I did this because free applications tend to be way more popular than paid applications. I will be doing an over all list(probably at the bottom of that page), but I’m thinking it will be top heavy with free apps. I limited this to 50 applications right now because I feel the list would be better. I had planned on starting off with top 10 or top 25 lists but decided to extend it to 50. As the website matures I will set it to list the top 100. It’s been almost 2 weeks since this plugin was installed, so the 30/365 lists will still look similar. As time passes these will start to become more useful. The 24 hours/7 days lists are turning out very well.
I have 1 more week at my ‘other job’. After that I will be working from home 24/7, so you can expect to see a lot more content flowing through the website. I would like to start keeping up with newly updated applications(which can range between 50-100 per day). I would like to double the amount of reviews I do. I also have a few new iPhone related projects in the works. One I will be only be a part of, one that I will only be doing like a weekly post on, and one that I would like to do. . .but will only do it if I have enough time(or can setup a way to automate it).
I am still looking for comments or suggests from everyone here. If you like something, tell me. . .if you don’t like something, let me know. I am always interested in hearing about new ideas, so if you would like to see a feature here I want to know.
All I want to see when I get to your website is:
1. your latest reviews, in order of completion, blog style please.
AND on the same page
2. The list of discounted apps for the day. [the list you have now is good]
All the other stuff is important but too busy. if I want that stuff, i can just look for it.
If you can set that up with a special link called “older version” that would be sweet.
Thanks, F.
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