Good evening readers,
As many of you have already noticed, Anime Herald’s gone through a few changes. Version 3.0 is now live, and we’re finished with the short, but definitely noticeable development hell that we’ve been going through.
Tonight, I’d like to take a moment and highlight a few of the bigger changes.
New Categories
If you look in the navigation bar, you may notice that we have three categories:
- Reviews
- Interviews
- Press Releases
For these sections, we’ve expanded upon our classical post format, in order to to add information that we previously weren’t offering.
In the case of reviews, we’ve included a few basics:
- Distributor
- Production Studio
- Whether we received the title as a screener
- Links to Additional information
We opted to disclose, off the bat, whether a title is a screener, since we rely on your trust. We believe that you, dear readers, should know up front where our review titles come from.
Interviews now separate information from the body of the review. At a glance, you’ll be able to tell precisely when and where it was taken.
Press releases are a new addition. since we receive so many, I figured it may be a good idea to give them a home that doesn’t contain the words “my e-mail inbox.” Press releases will be just as the name says. They’re press releases, albeit scrubbed of the contact information that often comes attached. We’ll include the name and a link to the publisher that distributed the release. When applicable, we’ll include a brief summary that includes the core points of the release. If the release comes with images, we’ll also do our best to include them.
We’re currently working to bring our reviews and interviews over to our new formats. So please, do bear with us as we get things up to speed! We’ll begin adding Press Releases beginning this week.
Responsive Layout
Our new theme is mobile responsive… meaning that it will look great on both standard and mobile browsers.
IE Compatible
Our last revision had, well… “disagreements” with IE. We’ve done all of our testing across the three core browser frameworks, and ensured that they are compatible. So, no more strange spacing or broken JQuery sliders!
Advertising
For the first time in The Herald’s history, we have ads. Unfortunately, we’ve gotten to a point where we can’t support our bandwidth bills out of pocket anymore, and we need to reach out to advertisers. This is a matter I didn’t take lightly. On the contrary, it’s something I did not want to do – I hate advertising as much as the next guy – but I simply couldn’t hold it back any longer.
However, you have my word that ad placement will always be finite here. As of today, we will have two placements – a banner at the top, and the existing square on the right – and that will be it in the near future. You are here for the content, you are here for the articles. You are not here to be bombarded by adverts and pleas to buy random crap from people you don’t know. I respect you, readers, and I want to maintain the trust we’ve formed over the past several years.
Ads, for the moment, will be handled by Google Adsense, which is mostly blind, in the sense that we have zero control over specific ads that display. As we grow, if we get to the point that we do start direct negotiations, our writers will take zero part in negotiations, in according to our Ethics Statement… which brings us to our last point:
Ethics
We now have an Ethics Statement, to which every single writer is expected to comply. This is, again, in the interest of running a more transparent, more honest publication.
All of that said, I thank you for your readership. You are all important to me, as with no readers, there is no Herald. So, as we go forward, I hope that you continue to join us as we continue our trek into the future.
