Site Updates
Announcing some site updates
Since SDP is primarily a Visual Effects company that's the area of business that I want to promote the most. However, our video statistics tracking system was showing a different trend. The stats pointed to the idea that the "editing" or "Videos" section of our portfolio was being hit the most. Furthermore, it was quite clear that this was being caused by menu system on the home page.
For this reason I decided to create a new home page menu system, with a much clearer directory. Before the menu buttons were listed "vfx", "videos" and "graphics". They were placed in an organic way that put "videos" at the top of the menu. Technically, going from right to left, "vfx" was actually first in line, but "videos" was slightly elevated. In any case, I realized that this system was failing miserably and it was time for a re-vamp.
Now, I really liked the over all design of the old menu, but it was very time consuming to create and I seem to have lost the original file. So, I had to come up with a new design. I must admit, that I am less happy with the new design, although I believe that in the short term it will serve my purposes just fine, which is the whole point anyway. The links are the important part, and whatever design I end up creating later, the layout of the new links will probably stay the same. The new system of links has "Visual Effects" prominently at the top center of the list. Below it, right to left are "Editing" and "Graphic Arts". I'm hoping that these distinctions will improve the flow of the site and drive people to the correct areas in the portfolio.
The other updates that were made to the site were all administrative. They allow me to print out (in a far more "permanent" format) the statistics collected to date, and it also allows me to (upon rare occasion) completely "zero out" all of the statistics.
Why would I want to do that? Well, in this case, since I've added many new videos and I've re-vamped the link system I want to get fresh data from the video stats system. So, by zeroing out the old data and can take a fresh look at how people are navigating the site. This is also the reason that I created a PDF writer to make "prints" of the current data so that even though I am erasing all the old data, I still have a record of it.
If all goes well these new improvements will help boost business and keep users guided in the right directions.
