Article: Resolutions of a Web Site
Around this time, most people make resolutions for improving their lives. Statistics show that most people don’t stick with them, however. To break tradition, we’ve decided to compile a list of resolutions we’re going to try to follow. Think of this as your behind-the-scenes look at the 2006 edition of SchwarzTech. Without further delay, here’s our top 10 resolutions for 2006.
A Wider Range of Reviews
We had quite a bit of reviews in 2005. What we’d like to do is expand our reviews to include even more new and exciting products—not just tired remakes of other products. We also want to make our reviews more exciting, yet still be informative.
An Improved Ratings System
To go hand-in-hand with the updated reviews, we’re eventually going to rework our ratings system. Since many products are perfectly acceptable for most users, 3-4 stars seem to be the average range. Five stars is reserved for products that are flawless. What we’d like to do is honor products that go above and beyond this, based on value or extra features, or just sheer simplicity, and work some sort of “editor’s choice” rating in there. We’re not sure how it’s going to be done, but once it’s in place, it will be great.
Cleaner Organization
2005 saw the change of our site to include more sections, new kids of features, and lots and lots of stuff. What we had to do was figure out ways to keep all of this organized. Fortunately for us, the system we have now works pretty well. In 2006, we want to perfect that so that SchwarzTech is very easy to use.
More News, More Often
The one area where we slacked in 2005 was news. We tried various projects to remedy this, but delays in the fall caused many editions to never see the light of day. After Macworld, we’re hoping to have news wrapups for you every week.
More Articles
Reviews were the key component of SchwarzTech in 2005, and we do want to continue that, but we also want to share our thoughts and bring you exciting features, since this is going to be one of the most interesting years in Apple history. I especially enjoyed the interview with Mike Pinkerton, and want to bring you more pieces like that.
Equal Mac/iPod Coverage
No doubt about it, right now the iPod is huge. Often overlooked by the mainstream media is the other product line from Apple—the Macs. Since the Intel shift is going to be major, that might change, but we remember that Apple did exist before the iPod and hope that our content reflects it.
No Annoying Ads
Ads are a necessary evil on the web today, but flash-based ones or other animated ones just stink. We’ll only have Google Ads or other image or text ads and that’s it.
Good Writers
Hopefully this won’t be something we have to change, but hopefully our writers will continue creating quality content for you, and if you have something to share, let us know…we’re always looking for guest contributors.
Respect for Dial-Up Users
Even in this day and age, more than half the people who get online use a telephone line. In some cases, the only options are expensive (such as cable, which can cost as much as $60/month), since DSL has not reached everywhere due to lazy phone companies. Because of this, every extra kilobyte loaded by our visitors takes time, so we aim to keep our site as light (but still well-designed) as possible.
Extra Features
This is the category where we’re just going to say that we’ll brainstorm some other cool things for SchwarzTech in the next few months…stay tuned.