I cant visualise the landing page of dpr, because as long as I can remember I have always kept a forum page open in my browsers and I have navigated from that. (I am not a member there any more: I just lurk.) Similarly here, I keep a thread page open and navigate to the rest via the “threads” page. I only turn my computer off when it is misbehaving, and the iPad is always on.
David
seriously if i hadnt read the thread title i wouldnt of known there were any changes.
Understood. It is what most of us who have been around this place for sometime do.
Now try to put aside your prior knowledge. Imagine someone has recommended The Photo to you and given you dprevived.com/ to have a look at. Try understanding it. How long do you think you would spend on the page before you go to to your previous photo site of choice? It is generally felt that a page where someone arrives for the first time has no more than two clicks to convince them this is a place they want to come to again.
dprevived.com/ isn't easy to grasp at first meeting but it is far easy to decipher for a newcomer than the previous dprevived.com/ The main purpose of the new dprevived.com/ is to give a structure that enables www.the-photo.org/ to work.
I suggesy dprevived.com/ is considerably easier for a newcomer to grasp than the previous Forum Index page. Even so, dprevived.com/ isn't designed for new arrivals. www.the-photo.org/ is what new arrivals will see first. If you have a look at it, it explains what we are about and gives direct links to easily understood things that might engage a newcomer.
For those who have never seen it, this is DPReview home page. www.dpreview.com/ - note all the ads - it would put me off if I was new.
You can get rid of the ads with browser extensions and then it looks like this:
I think the-photo.org has the edge! 😁
I am concerned about the so-called "landing page". In particular:
how do new arrivals get "directed" to it?
I suspect but can not prove that, even now, there are many more links to the original URL out there than there are to the later-introduced "landing page". If that is the case, the "landing page" will remain obscure to all but the 50 or so regular users of this site.
Has Admin researched the ratio of original to landing-page links on the web rather than telling us it just ain't so?
Just imagine that some friendly blogger starts promoting us and directing his/her readers to the-photo. Or someone of us starts social media campaign, promoting the-photo - current references to our sites are not the measure of possible future references.
Believe me, this all is quite throughly discussed over. There are different potential user groups and for some of these such approach should work better then direct drive to forums - for me and most likely for you this is not so, but we (having more technical or IT background) are only very small part of general public.
Ted,
We have looked into this. We expect that most referrals will come from other people rather than a new person trying to do a google search. As time goes by search engines will find us.
We don't want to grow too fast - that way lies madness. Don't forget, we are not in this for profit - we just want to build a friendly community where we can learn from each other and enjoy the fruits of our labours.
Alan
