I had an email today. It came from someone who has been visiting this site for nearly four years. Whilst I’m not going to mention names, I will mention what the email said..
“Well eventually you have managed to squeeze so many adverts and revenue links into your home page (and every other page) that I’m bored of waiting your home page to load. I will be giving your site a miss in the future. I hope you heed this advice and remove some of the crap you have slowly inserted into the site. It’s a shame really because I have followed your site from the days of the orange C500 release but I’ve had enough.”
I’m sure there’ll be plenty of reaction to this but first I want to have my say. Yes, I’ll admit it, there were too many ads on the site and yes, it was having an effect on load times. It takes emails like this for me to realise at times because, in our never-ending quest to cover costs, we slap adverts onto the site to pay for everything. Sometimes I forget what it’s like to be on the “other side” of the screen, so today I’ve taken the decision to take down 12 ad blocks from the main site and 3 from the forum. Sure, this will disappoint many of our partners and advertisers, but without visitors, what’s the point?
I can’t remove all the adverts obviously, but this cull has had to occur in order to bring a little balance back to the site. You should notice a dramatic speed improvement and please, feel free to let me know your comments below.