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If you've been visiting TVShowsOnDVD.com for less than 8 years, the previous design of the site is all you've ever seen. We figured after years and years of having the same look, maybe it was time for something new. This is the third design of the site, and while we know most of you will love it, there will always be those that hate, hate, hate the change, but don't worry, we have you covered. Starting next Tuesday, you'll have the option to view the "Classic" site. Why wait a week? We think that a week is enough to get to know the new site, and if you still hate it, at least you spent some time with it to form your opinion, so you can switch it back. This will be done with cookies, so you'll need to have those enabled, and you can switch back any computer you use (as opposed to having to log into the site for the classic view).
So, what's new on the site? The biggest change is that we've moved the navigation menu from the side, to the top. This was a better management of space, and allowed us to add a few other things to the content pages. News items used to only be linked from the homepage, and unless you visited the homepage, you may not notice some of the hot news that Dave had posted. We solved that by including the last 5 news items on every page. The "pick of the week" has always been on every page of the site, but now we've also added a link to the most recent review.
We've added a few new pages to the site as well. If you look under "Browse DVDs" you'll find "Browse Top DVDs" at the bottom. This allows you to browse the top 100 popular TV-DVDs, or browse the top DVDs in a particular genre. The list pulls in sales data from Amazon.com, so it's ever-changing, and is sometimes fun to browse just to see what's hot. Also under "Browse DVDs" is a new page called "All Upcoming Releases." We've taken all the upcoming DVDs from now until infinity and placed them in one spot. Now you can quickly scan an alphabetical list of shows to see if something you want is coming out, without having to look at each month separately. The list also contains titles without a date but are available to be preordered.
As more and more people have been visiting the sales page on the site (gotta love Google Analytics), we wanted to highlight that on the front page, so we've put up some box art and information on some randomly-selected titles based on two sets of criteria. The first two (going left-to-right) are some titles with the largest percentage off, while the other two are based on the largest dollar savings. Below the sales information you'll find some of the popular upcoming titles. They'll load randomly, so it's likely that you'll see a bunch of different titles there every time you visit the site (it pulls from the top 20 upcoming titles, so you may also see duplicates).
The recent news can be found below the sales & upcoming titles, but it doesn't have to be there if you don't want it. Notice the little arrow beside "Latest News" pointing up? Just click on that and a cookie will be set on your computer that brings the news items to the top of the page, and the sales & upcoming titles at the bottom. If you want to switch it back, just click on the down arrow and it'll return to the default page layout. You can also change the news position by going into "Site Preferences" located under "Resources."
We've been working on this new design for about 3 months in conjunction with our owners at TVGuide.com, and we're really happy with it. I (Gord) have tried redesigning the site in the past, but I've always ended up with something I hated. As this project got closer and closer to being complete, I became more and more excited about the new design, and we hope you'll enjoy it as well. And just remember, if you hate the new design you can change it back to the old design next Tuesday. Of course, constructive criticism is always welcome, just be sure to select "Contact Gord Lacey" in the "To" field.
  
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