[Blue Crisp]

Preface: logging-in to comment - is it strictly necessary?
Congratulations on moving! It is a very promising venture and I like the more modern colours.
Unfortunately I find the layout of your front page both confusing and cluttered. It is also lamentable that you have had to sell your souls in terms of intrusive advertising, however I'm hardly naïf when it comes to the reasoning. I was more amenable to the former advertising model you had - it was large enough to be noticed without being garish and intrusive. I don't think that more pictures and colours make it a better site at the expense of the hard graft which is writing articles and blogging. I find the site's former strengths diluted and the presentation much less suited to adults of independent intellect who chose the Mac route and stripped of the elegance which symbolises our platform. The advertising layout cheapens the site terribly and shows that the sphere of Mac business, being one of the last bastions of traditional American competitive quality, is slowly descending into the base-price spiral, at any cost to its values. I'm sorry to be so harsh and it doesn't lessen my indebtedness to you over the years in learning so much from your well-written articles. I think however I also have to bid farewell to this site. Good luck!

[Philbert]

I don't agree that the old site was void of intrusive ads. I found the flash ads extremely annoying - even those produced my Macworld itself.

However, the rest of your comments are spot on. I understand the need for ads. (In fact, I'm IN the ad business myself.) Although the Macworld site is "free", the people who run it do need to make money. What's truly sad to me though, is this ever-increasing direction for web advertising to poke people in the eye to gain attention. It seems that producing creative, witty or thought-provoking advertising to sell a product is no longer necessary or desired - just jump up, and smack viewers over the head with a 2x4 so they'll click on reflex is the model of the day. Sad, truly sad.

At any rate, ads are a touchy subject with the beneficiaries here ... but there are ways to deal with annoying ads. I can't/won't get into specifics but suffice to say I don't find the new site's ad structure any more intrusive than the old.

That's all I'm sayin' ...

-phil

[kellie]

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Kellie | Online Community Manager