Dinosaur Toy Blog changes

[Crackington]

That looks really good Dr Admin - I liked being able to click on the images to get to the reviews. I'd use it.

[Faelrin]

No I like this. Will save time for folks wanting to read a review of a particular figure or animal without needing to scroll for it or do a search. All the same you keep the option to browse to which is good in case one wants to do that.

[marisaura]

I'm experimenting with a Quick Links section, which I'm considering adding to the top of each category page. The idea is that it will provide a simple overview of all the reviews in that category with a small thumbnail for each. I could add the review title as well but it starts to get messy and takes up a lot of space doing that. Here's what it would look like for the AAA Brand category:
https://dinotoyblog.com/category/aaa/

What do you think, would this be useful if I rolled it out across the blog, or is it a waste of time?

i think this is a great idea - scrolling through reviews for some of the more prolific brands can especially be a hassle.

[Fembrogon]

I'm experimenting with a Quick Links section, which I'm considering adding to the top of each category page. The idea is that it will provide a simple overview of all the reviews in that category with a small thumbnail for each. I could add the review title as well but it starts to get messy and takes up a lot of space doing that. Here's what it would look like for the AAA Brand category:
https://dinotoyblog.com/category/aaa/

What do you think, would this be useful if I rolled it out across the blog, or is it a waste of time?

I love the quick links; I've seen them set up on a couple of other categories before and it's both attractive and convenient, a thorough preview of everything ahead of the viewer to browse through. Obviously the links will look intimidating for the largest categories, but it's not like the viewer doesn't have pages and pages of results to peruse anyway.
I'm fully on board.

[Halichoeres]

I like it!

[DinoToyForum]

Thanks for all the resoundingly positive feedback. I'll roll this out to other brands then.

Ideally, I'd also like to have quick links for the Genus sections too (I'm not sure about the Classification, Age, or Type sections), but the plugin I'm using doesn't allow that. So, I need to find a similar plugin that works for all taxonomies or work out how to code that myself.

[Gwangi]

I like it too. And it makes sense. Now users won't have to scroll through pages of reviews to see everything that's there. Speaking of which, what I don't like are the new ads spaced out between reviews. When scrolling through a list of reviews there's an ad after every 2-4 reviews. It's obnoxious!

[DinoToyForum]

I like it too. And it makes sense. Now users won't have to scroll through pages of reviews to see everything that's there. Speaking of which, what I don't like are the new ads spaced out between reviews. When scrolling through a list of reviews there's an ad after every 2-4 reviews. It's obnoxious!

Thanks, and I'll go about removing those ads between reviews.

[Gwangi]

I like it too. And it makes sense. Now users won't have to scroll through pages of reviews to see everything that's there. Speaking of which, what I don't like are the new ads spaced out between reviews. When scrolling through a list of reviews there's an ad after every 2-4 reviews. It's obnoxious!

Thanks, and I'll go about removing those ads between reviews.

Thanks, they're on the ATB too. I only just started noticing them over the last couple days.

[DinoToyForum]

Thanks for all the resoundingly positive feedback. I'll roll this out to other brands then.

Ideally, I'd also like to have quick links for the Genus sections too (I'm not sure about the Classification, Age, or Type sections), but the plugin I'm using doesn't allow that. So, I need to find a similar plugin that works for all taxonomies or work out how to code that myself.

I was able to find a different plugin that does the same thing for both categories (Brand) and tags (Genus), so I'm starting to add quicklinks to genus pages, too.

e.g. https://dinotoyblog.com/tag/acrocanthosaurus/

We don't need this for every Brand and Genus so I'll have to decide the threshold, maybe those with a minimum of five reviews.

[DinoToyForum]

I like it too. And it makes sense. Now users won't have to scroll through pages of reviews to see everything that's there. Speaking of which, what I don't like are the new ads spaced out between reviews. When scrolling through a list of reviews there's an ad after every 2-4 reviews. It's obnoxious!

Thanks, and I'll go about removing those ads between reviews.

Thanks, they're on the ATB too. I only just started noticing them over the last couple days.

I've been experimenting with Adsense and new ad positions. But because the ads are responsive and don't always appear, it's difficult for me to judge how disruptive they are. So I appreciate the feedback. I've also noticed some of the new ads appear much too big, so I'm trying to fix that too.

[DinoToyForum]

The Quick links can also provide a helpful visual overview of an entire line, for brands where all of the toys have been reviewed. e.g. Invicta (minus the blue whale which is on the Animal Toy Blog now), here's a screenshot:

[Gwangi]

Should announcements really be included under the brand tag? I was just looking through the Haolonggood reviews and all of those announcements really add a lot of clutter when you're just trying to find reviews.

[DinoToyForum]

Should announcements really be included under the brand tag? I was just looking through the Haolonggood reviews and all of those announcements really add a lot of clutter when you're just trying to find reviews.

I think @suspy and I discussed this at some point and we decided to keep the Brand tags on the announcements. But we could reconsider.

[DinoToyForum]

This is also relevant to the 'Quick links' I'm working on, which is becoming a bit tricky for certain categories with lots of entries. For example, there are 249 posts tagged 'Collecta'. That's too many to have all the thumbnails on one page. I tried that and it becomes a giant wall of images (extremely so on mobile where there is only space for three thumbnails in each row). It also takes ages to load. So, I'm trying to divide the large categories into pages of quick links. I'm testing it out on the CollectA page so please take a look and let me know if you have any feedback: https://dinotoyblog.com/category/collecta/

[DefinitelyNOTDilo]

I quite like this setup!

[Gwangi]

That works well!

[bmathison1972]

I like it, too. Planning on doing something similar at ye old ATB?

[DinoToyForum]

I like it, too. Planning on doing something similar at ye old ATB?

Probably, for certain 'brands' and 'classifications', but most 'name(s)' have only one or two reviews so there's no need there - there's a much greater species diversity on the ATB compared to the DTB.

I think I'll make the threshold 10 and see how that goes.

[DinoToyForum]

I've added quick links to all the brand pages with >10 reviews. Please browse through them to check if I've made any mistakes.

Next time I'll do the genus pages.