We’re trialing some new ad formats.

One sits on the left and right hand sides of the screen, the other on the footer of the page. They’re designed to not be too intrusive, but to tempt those interested to interact with them.

When the reader hovers over the graphics for three seconds, a new, full screen advert is shown. Each of the has a Minimise arrow too.

There will always be a X in the top left of the screen to close the full screen advert down, once readers have finished interacting with them.

We’re being selecting as to which brands/campaigns we’re allowing to be shown – picking ones that we think chime with our readership.

Examples

We’ve had to de-active the nRelate plugin on the main site.

It’s a shame, because we started using it from their very earliest days (before they became big), but it’s simply stopped working. The ‘related’ posts that it brings up are the same for each article.

We’ve tried upgrading the plug-in and using the nRelated re-index button, quite a number of times, but no joy.

Currently there isn’t enough time to get to the bottom of the problem.

Doing a before/after Webpage speed test as well to see if there’s a boost when not loading it.

Update: No appreciable difference between before and after.

We’d noticed that the Home page of OnTheWight has been taking longer to load.

This evening we’ve had a change around, removing the Facebook, Twitter and Flickr Widgets from the home page.

We’re dropped two of the sliders – Film & Book reviews – from the bottom of the phone page and reduced the number of stories that were loaded into the remaining sliders.

Pleased to report that First View Load times are down over a quarter.