We’ve changed the way the third party reviews run, and made a few more changes at the back end which have speeded the site up again. The loading time should be down to 2-3 seconds per page now, so the site should be running far better across the board.
We’d really like to get a more mobile friendly theme, but that’s a big job. If anyone knows a friendly designer, then let us know, because we’ve got a few too many options for the current site. (If you’re good at design and not coding that’s fine, we’ve got a couple of very good coders onboard already!)
The other thing we’re working on is member functions using the Xenforo accounts. The first one to roll out should be the replacement for the voting plugin, which will then hopefully get the calendar reminders working through email.
And Outbrain and the backfill network are performing very well after the initial teething problems. The scary figure is the sheer amount of traffic we’re getting from Ireland which is higher than the UK and the fact we got more clicks from the Isle of Man than the US or Canada.
The problem is that long-term this won’t be workable, so we’re looking at ways to get people to chip in. The CPC on our current setup is much lower than anything else we’ve encountered and there’s a fifty percent click through rate from the reviews to Amazon, so it definitely helps promotion – it is just the ethical issue of charging.
