Monday, August 18, 2014

New Helping Ad Roll-Out Ready to Begin

It's been checked & double checked!
The fresh, new, better ad code is ready to be added to SonicGear. But, why should you care about ads? Aren't those the enemy?

Not with this new code.
Google is the king of search for a reason. They know & can see what's relevant & what's not. That's why they're the ones to trust to put up ads for actual Sonic products on the pages of SonicGear. From the start, the ads on Gear were always there as a TOOL for the VIEWER of the site. They were things meant for you to use to have a better experience there. Looking at a page of key chains should give an ad for key chains, just in case someone wanted to collect one they saw on the page.

Sonic Gear should be able to do the following things:
Show ALL possible Sonic the hedgehog merchandise
Educate anyone about any Sonic merch they want to know about with pictures/text/video/sounds
Provide a comprehensive idea of what items were like / what they did / where they were, etc.
Let people know where & how to get items, if they want the things for themselves

It's the ads that do that last bit, along with the Gear Store & sometimes a line on where it was found that appears in the item description. All 3 things working together help complete the experience & make it nice.

As the code aged though, it got harder for it to post relevant things.
This overhaul will fix that by adding fresh code to every page. It's not going to all roll out in one week though. There are way too many pages for that to happen. It's also why this week's update was a little small. (That, and only 2 actual new items were sent in--there's not enough time to fix the pages AND scour the folders for old material)

New page:
The "Don't use Adblocker Software" page.
This page explains how the ads are supposed to help, and also lets people know it can break the GearStore viewing experience. It has a thorough explanation for what's going on with blockers. Since I personally never use one, I overlooked the problem until people started complaining that:

"The Gear Store is empty"
"The page says you could find links to buy tees at the upper left edge of the page but it is blank there"
and
"I never see any links to buy Sonic items on Gear even though the site says there should be."

ALL of these complaints are caused by adblockers, they're hiding the stuff that these people wanted to see. It's easy to forget that a blocker is turned on, too, so some kind of notice will be sure to help.

A better notice will appear on the main page once all of the ads are fixed.

Next week:
Who knows. I can't do the "videos section" for shows while trying to put up all the new ads. Hopefully some product or something comes out so the regular merchandise pages can have an update.

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