Bigger Picture, Bigger Sound
New York, NY, September 28, 2010 -- A little more than five years after its launch, one of the most influential movie and home theater web sites, Big Picture Big Sound has launched a major site redesign and added top talent to its roster. "Our site has been growing steadily in traffic and reputation, but it had a dated look and feel," says Editor in Chief and Co-Founder Chris Boylan. "We wanted to give the site a more modern look and also integrate social networking features, in order to enhance the site's impact, popularity and relevance."
To this end, the site hired web designer and developer extraordinaire, Beth McCabe. McCabe works on multimedia ad campaigns and digital projects for a number of high profile, high tech clients and, as a fan and frequent reader of Big Picture Big Sound, was a natural fit for the site clean-up and redesign project. A week after McCabe joined the team, the web site's syndication of articles in Google News went from approximately 50% to nearly 100%, just by tweaking the site's templates and making the site W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) compliant. But her contributions didn't stop there.
Ms. McCabe implemented the site founders' vision of a newer, more modern web site in just a few short weeks, and the results have been outstanding. The site now offers a more inviting, more graphically oriented home page, which draws readers in more effectively. Individual articles now include social media plug-ins such as the ability to "Like" articles on facebook or share the article with other readers on sites such as DIGG, Reddit and Twitter. "Since we launched the facebook plug-in a few weeks ago, the site's facebook fan-base has tripled," says Boylan. "We're also seeing more activity in the forum, on facebook and on Twitter as our readers comment on stories, ask questions, and share their favorite articles with their friends."
The site is currently seeing upwards of 150,000 unique visitors per month with peak traffic much higher in the run-up to the holiday shopping season. The site topped out last year at nearly 400,000 visits in one month, but Boylan expects this record to be toppled in the 2010 holiday season. "As the holidays approach, people are looking for gift ideas, and equipment and gadget reviews as well as great deals on the electronics items and movie software that we review and write about on the site. They also come back after their purchases to read about how to hook everything up for best results." The site's informative How-To articles such as "How to Hook up your HDTV," "How to Get Music on your iPod" and "How to Paint Your Own Projection Screen" continue to bring in thousands of visitors per day, contributing toward the steady traffic growth.
According to third party site traffic analysis firm, Quantcast, the site attracts a demographic that is college educated (61%), mostly male (78%), 35 to 49+ (56%), with household incomes of $60,000 and above (52%). This makes the site a perfect venue for companies targeting those purchasing high-end consumer electronics items.
Showing that the commitment to quality doesn't stop at appearances alone, the Web site has recently brought on some of the most well-known, most talented journalists in the CE industry, including Geoffrey Morrison (Home Entertainment, Home Theater), Dennis Burger (Home Entertainment, Home Tech Tell), Greg Robinson (eGear) and Ian White (Enjoy The Music). These writers join Boylan and current crack CE journalists Rachel Cericola, Chris Chiarella, Peter Suciu and Enid Burns to cover news and reviews related to home theater, HDTV, 3D TV and Blu-ray. For the recent CEDIA Expo in Atlanta, the team generated over 40 different news stories and product features on the latest home theater gear announced and shown at the event.
The movie review section of the site has also grown of late, with more than 200 new original movie reviews added to the site each year from such well-established voices as David Kempler, Lexi Feinberg, Karen Dahlstrom and site co-founder Joe Lozito, a member of the Online Film Critic Society, and featured critic on the popular film review web site, RottenTomatoes.com.
