Where's The New Reviews? Is YF Sinking...?

“Where’s the New Reviews?” ​

As some of you know, I’ve been away from YF for the past 3-4 months working on a propulsion project. I’ve declined a number of contracts over the years because I believed time spent on YF had greater value. But at some point, I have to make a living too.

Regretfully, we’ve gone 6 weeks without uploading a new review and I won’t have anything live until just before FLIBS. I’m waiting to board several vessels coming into Lauderdale before the show. Why am I sharing this with everyone…?

The money coming from my real work has being funneled into a refit for YF. It’s been 2 months of intense code work, but as of today we have many new ‘visible’ features and one very important, but very invisible upgrade to YF.

So let’s get to the refit!​

Thumbnail pictures have been created for all the News, Reviews, Features & Concept categories. This is a much more intuitive user interface that completes YF’s online magazine presence…

News…
http://www.yachtforums.com/forums/yacht-news-builds-launches-239/

Reviews…
http://www.yachtforums.com/forums/yacht-reviews-feature-stories-142/

Features…
http://www.yachtforums.com/forums/special-features-live-show-coverage-273/

Concepts…
http://www.yachtforums.com/forums/future-yachts-concept-boats-289/


Review Showcases have been created for all of the manufacturer’s forums with thumbnails accompanying each review. The displays are positioned just above the index page for each builder. We’ve done this for over 100 builder’s forums. Here are a couple of examples…

Westport Forum…
http://www.yachtforums.com/forums/westport-yacht-65/

Burger Forum…
http://www.yachtforums.com/forums/burger-yacht-27/

Trinity Forum...
http://www.yachtforums.com/forums/trinity-yacht-63/


We have added about 80 wallpapers to YF’s Gallery, bringing the total to nearly 500 computer screen cover shots. It takes about an hour to process each one, so we've got some time into this! We've also added thumbnail images of each builder’s logo to accompany their listing in the Reviews & Features Showcases, giving builders better branding when readers visit their forum...

Gallery…
http://www.yachtforums.com/forums/luxury-mega-super-yacht-builders-262/


For all of YF’s Reviews dating back to 2004, we've embedded hyperlinks on the lead-in images that take readers directly to the review. That last item isn’t a big deal, but it’s the details that count in a good refit. Personally, I’m fine with simple listings of Reviews, News, etc. (the standard forum format), but we have to respect our retina challenged readers who are too lazy read anything accept a picture!

That covers the little pictures. Let’s get to the BIG picture…​

You can’t see it, but 1000's of lines of code underlying YF has been radically rewritten to enable YF to become indexed in Google’s News Feed. Google will not index any URL containing the word ‘forum’ because this is considered Consumer Generated Content, or CGC. What that means is… they don’t consider forum inhabitants to be credible news sources. With many forums, I would agree. But we all know that’s not the case at YF!

Back to coding; for all of YF’s News, Reviews, Concepts and Features, the underlying vB code has been re-written to remove the word ‘forum’ from each URL and replace it with ‘features”. Soon, I will submit this to Google, but we still have some tweaking to do. Because the URL's for these sectors have been re-written, we will have lots of dead links in major search engines resulting in a temporary drop in traffic. But in time, this will result in MUCH more traffic, better rankings and more inbound links from quality sources.

Welcome to the new YachtForums!

***​

I need to apologize to the members that posted in this thread. It was not meant to be an open thread and I removed your posts. Sorry!

This thread was intended to be the basis of member mail-out going out yesterday, but I was unable to commence the mailer. Will save for next week.

Thanks everyone!