Merry Christmas and stuff, hope you’ve been having a brilliant one.
That Was A Bit Mental will soon be turning one year old and with around 100 reviews in its first year I’m happy with its success so far, a success mainly down to any of you who’ve ever read the site, for which I’m eternally grateful.
If you’ve read the Spirited Away review below you’ll notice that I’ve put a page break in it, meaning you’ll only see half the review followed by a “Read more” link. Usually I’ve been putting the full reviews on the main site but I’m going to be changing to this method from now on for a few reasons.
1) Hits
I’m not going to dick about here – basically, the more hits I get the more I can convince film labels to send me review discs, and the more timely and useful film reviews will appear on the site as a result. I’ve already been very fortunate to review the likes of The Exterminator, Deadly Blessing and Cannibal before their release on DVD or Blu-ray, giving you a good chance to consider whether they’re worth buying. The more hits I get, the more of the same will start happening. Oh, here comes a break now, by the way.
2) More accurate stats
At the moment, the majority of my hits come from people being linked to the main site from search engines. Once they’re on there however, I have no way of knowing how far they read down. Do they read all ten of the latest reviews on the front page, or do they give up almost right away? With a page break I can see exactly how many people were interested enough to actually want to keep reading. With this info I can see which reviews were the most interesting and do more like that.
3) More articles on page 1
At the moment the site is set to show the last ten articles on the front page, but since they’re so long that’s an awful lot to scroll through. With page breaks I can afford to change this to 15 or maybe even 20 articles without making it worse.
That’s about it really. In short, if you start reading one of my reviews from the front page now and you like what you’ve read so far, click on “Read more” at the end to see the full article, complete with all the screens, words, the trailer and the patented TWABM Trev-O-Meter score as usual.
I hope you’ve all enjoyed reading the site so far, and hopefully it’ll be onwards and upwards for 2012.
Chris
