@brucewee - I truly hope so. I'm sick of relying on this kind of advertising
I guess the big question is what comes next?
I've been wondering this as well. It's arguable that the need for news sites to drive clicks means they promote controversial content more than they ever used to and that could be part of the problem with modern politics. I would guess we move to an internet where part of your subscription is given to the sites you visit, a bit like modern streaming.
It is becoming almost unusable. Between every item on the site i click on, i get an ad that i then have to click past to progress. Each step takes 5-10 secs. Its becoming harder now and more tedious so yep it is starting to put me off visiting
I mistakenly went to browse the site on a device Im not logged into (STW) yesterday, and yes, basically unusable.
Interesting point. I must say I had noticed youtube had ramped up the ads massively, to the point I've been looking for something else for content. I don't have an ad blocker installed as I know that ads help support various sites I use, but, there is a balance to be had.
Oh and another small bit of advice, and I'm sorry if this comes across patronising its well intended. Feel free to ignore if you've already done your due diligence
In my line of business I often see clients that believe that moving to the next tech platform XYZ will solve all their problems with their existing platform they spend £(millions) implementing the new tech, but keep the same failing model and processes. So, now they have new tech, which no one understands, a big dent in the wallet and are mostly in the same position they were in before. I'd hate to see this happen to STW.
Make sure you are super sure about moving to new tech is the thing you need to do, web/cms aren't my specialities, but maybe there are a few on STW who are experts, and who will volunteer some detailed advice for free to help you - its always good to talk to outsiders to get a potentially different viewpoint to help with your decision making.
You don't want ads?
Take out a subscription.
If you won't take out a sub, stop complaining.
We hope to shift to WordPress VIP, which is a hosted service that runs some of the worlds largest websites.
Re-engineering or just a ‘lift and shift’ to a new platform? If the latter it may be like putting lipstick on a pig. I thought one of the main issues was the quick and dirty patches that have been applied over the years which has created a huge ‘tech debt’ that needs addressing?
Thanks for the advice there DT78 but we've been in the CMS tech game for 23 years and are experts at running a massive site on next to nothing. Don't worry about the due diligence, we've been working on this for months already. We are on Wordpress already. The move is to Wordpress but with a lot of support from the service that will free up our tech to do better things, so we are pretty confident in the strategy and there have been a lot of meetings to date with Wordpress VIP techy to techy. The remaining issue is how we fund the move. It's effectively the same annual cost as we pay now but just no longer split into 12 monthly payments. But like all decisions there's risk. All we can do is do what we can and use what we know to minimise the risks as much as we can.
I'd put less links to articles in the sidebar and couple more rotating links to merch - you'd barely know you had a shop if you didn't go looking for it.
Especially at this time of year.
Might ballance out the resident politics "experts" a bit.
Would make a nice print on a STW T-shirt?
