The New Movies Music & Television, Hope You Like It.

Ok, so it's been a few days now and I thought I better check in and see how you like the new template, and some of the other changes that I've made. The template was changed for a couple of reasons, first and foremost was to make it easier to read, I think I've achieved that when we launched on Saturday with the latest Person of Interest review I thought it looked really good with lots more room for the text to be displayed, more emphasis was placed on the content rather than the two sidebars we had previously. My second aim was to hopefully improve hits the site receives from Google and other search engines, it seems to have done the trick this far and you may have noticed that POI knocked Geordie Shore off the top spot on the Popular Post section (rotates on 7 day basis) for the first time, Geordie Shore is a massive traffic puller for the site and having POI go above it was a real achievement for me as it has come close in the past but this time it's gone way and above it (172 hits in the three days it's been there).

I'm going to run through a few of the new things now, as well as talk about a couple of things that will be changed in the next few days.

Google Search: You may have noticed at the top of the right (and only) sidebar a search box has appeared, you can now search Google directly from the site, saves you going back to Google, waiting for it to load and then typing your search, just do it here.

Popular Posts replaced with Favourites: the Popular posts feature is something that I've always had on the site, unfortunately it doesn't really get much click through action so for that reason I have replaced it with the "Favourites" tag cloud, that makes it easier to find all your favourite TV shows right away and narrow down what your looking for. If you click one of these links the list of posts will appear on the left hand timeline of the home page which I'll explain now.

Homepage Timeline: This is the widget which displays all the latest posts on the homepage and sits on the left of the site just under the image slider. If you click links in the "Favourites" section to go see what's in the archive then every post which has been "tagged" with that word or words will appear here.

Image Slider: I already had one of these, difference is this one is a lot neater and a lot easier to maintain. The slider will display whichever TV shows I'm reviewing at the time along with the latest movie or Blu-ray review.

News Update: This widget sits above the image slider and acts as kind of an RSS feed for the site showing you all the latest posts, really it's just another way to attract you to click on another article which is a neat little feature I think.

Linking In: This was on the very bottom right of the blog and displayed links to various blogging directory's which this site was listed on. Google don't like that anymore and to be honest I can count on one hand the amount of traffic they all provided as a whole, the blog has been removed form all of those sites so I have removed their links and renamed the section "Stats and Readers", it now only has the StatCounter and Feedburner logos.

Still to come;

You may have noticed that the links on the top and bottom bars (the yellow ones) do not work, I'm working on that and we will see how it goes but it will probably end up with those links removed and me creating something which allows you to get to the "About" and "Contact" pages, more importantly than that are the "Movies A - Z" and "TV A - Z" pages, they will be fixed and available in the next couple of days.

There are going to be some advertising opportunities here to, I'm just busy working up the details on that right now but primarily it will be aimed at advertising for other blogs, products or websites.

I think that's about it, so what do you think? Do you like the new template? Did you find it easier to read? Please leave your comments and let me know what you think, maybe you have a suggestion on what I can add, something you liked before that I have removed, let me know I'm open to ideas, most importantly, enjoy.