Bringing Our Written Reviews Back WITHOUT ADS, ft. Wendell of Level1Techs
**The Evolution of Our Content Strategy**
As we continue to grow and evolve as a website, it's essential to take a closer look at our content strategy and how it has changed over time. When we first started, our primary focus was on creating high-quality video content that would drive engagement and revenue through ads. While this approach worked well in the early days, we realized that there were limitations to relying solely on video content.
**Preserving Old Content**
One of the challenges we faced as a small team was managing the volume of new content while maintaining consistency and quality. To address this, we decided to preserve our old articles and videos, ensuring that they remained available to readers who might be searching for specific information or wanting to revisit older content. This approach allowed us to maintain a sense of continuity and familiarity, while also providing a wealth of knowledge and experience for our audience.
**The Difference Between Published Articles and Videos**
It's essential to note that the way we present our content differs significantly between published articles and videos. When we publish an article, it's often based on existing written work, whereas video content requires more production time and effort. Our approach is to create new articles almost daily, which might be slightly delayed compared to when the corresponding video goes live. This allows us to provide a comprehensive view of our thought process and expertise, while also catering to different learning styles and preferences.
**Adding Additional Content**
We've observed that readers tend to prefer written content for more in-depth analysis and recommendations. Conversely, video viewers often rely on visual charts and infographics to make their purchasing decisions. To address this, we add additional content to our articles, consolidating mid-video ad libed thoughts into a organized conclusion. This ensures that readers receive both the raw data and expert insights they need to inform their choices.
**Thousands of Articles Preserved**
One of the most exciting aspects of our new setup is that thousands of existing articles from our old site have been preserved and made searchable through Google. These archives are still accessible via YouTube video links, allowing readers to revisit older content or find specific information on a particular topic. While we'll be updating these articles with fresh insights and perspectives, it's reassuring to know that they remain available for those who want to explore our back catalog.
**The Future of Our Content Strategy**
As we move forward, we're committed to maintaining a sustainable and ad-free model that prioritizes user experience and quality content. With the support of our community through Patreon and affiliate revenue, we can continue to produce high-quality videos and articles without compromising on our values. We'll be keeping a close eye on feedback and suggestions from our readers, incorporating them into our strategy to ensure that our content remains engaging, informative, and relevant.
**The Road Ahead**
We're excited to embark on this new chapter in our journey as Gamers Nexus. Our website has been built by an actual professional, rather than a solo operator like myself, which is a significant improvement. We'll continue to add new content regularly, including backdated articles and newer pieces that showcase the latest developments in PC hardware and gaming. Whether you're looking for expert advice on buying the best graphics card or just want to stay up-to-date with the latest news and reviews, we invite you to check out our website and experience what we have to offer.
**Supporting Our Efforts**
If you'd like to support our efforts in bringing high-quality content to your fingertips, please consider visiting our Patreon page at patreon.com/gamersnexus. Additionally, you can find us on YouTube as Gamers Nexus, where we share our video reviews and benchmarks with the world. By choosing to engage with us through these channels, you're helping to ensure that our website remains free from ads and remains a trusted resource for PC hardware enthusiasts worldwide.
**Conclusion**
In conclusion, our content strategy has evolved significantly over time, from relying solely on video content to incorporating written articles and preserving old content. While there are still many challenges ahead, we're confident in our ability to maintain the high standards of quality and engagement that have come to define Gamers Nexus. Thank you for watching, and we look forward to continuing this journey together!
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday we're bringing back our written article reviews in completely adree format and it's with the engineering help and Wizardry of Wendell from level one Tex some certain janitorial things were needed at Gamers Nexus in 2008 working from this 10x10 childhood bedroom I originally launched this website but now it looks like this and it's really easy to find things and fast thanks Wendell thanks Steve the website from 2008 until today has had a few makeovers but not much changed and it was extremely slow and extremely cumbersome to use in the back end and it broke a lot the new website loads Stupid Fast and it makes it really easy to see our reviews in full depth along with the videos we have image comparison tools for in-depth graphic settings analysis pieces we have detailed photo guides for cooler installation and seen every angle of the products not just in video we have tons of charts and for those of you who just want to read or just want long-term references that are way easier to find and search for after the video goes live this has what you want each review is also only one single page but there's one thing we don't have an onslaught of ads rendering the page completely unreadable and links to doctors being speechless because you won't believe you won't believe won't believe that that doesn't mean anything why would and 880,000 people Shar it on Facebook although do kind of want to learn about the Boomer skills but look how fast and clean these pages are without Those ads because our YouTube channel affiliate store and patreon revenue support us enough already we could put three ad spots there and probably no one would complain not in a meaningful way but the extra money it's not worth compromising our goal which is creating the best user experience possible we can at least start with minimizing the JavaScript and the the toe fungus ads that appear on the side of the screen thanks to the website is meant in part to be community service and that's the main reason to relaunch it because cataloging things in written format on the internet has gotten really really bad as video has killed everything and we've been a part of that we abandoned our own written content because video was the only sustainable business model but the consequence of everybody doing that is that there are a lot fewer Tech websites around with information that you can just quickly read and get your answer there's one other personal reason I wanted to read launched the website though I debated whether or not I should bother sharing this but for major Milestones like this maybe twice over the years I've been a little more open on this side so for years it's bothered me that we stopped publishing on the website specifically because that's the last part of the business that my dad really had a lot of exposure to uh where you I got to show him that part of it and he would send me texts uh shorthand of course just like read the article wow you are awesome uh so I lost him in 2015 and had to make things work pretty fast to support myself what I was trying to do and try to help you know support the family when my mom was cleaning toilets which was not enough to afford the the mortgage and some of the other medical costs but we had about one to two years of Runway to get things in order before the reserves would run out and that was when I took the clearest path possible which was investing completely in video and going forward as hard as possible with YouTube now during that time I maintained the website for a while but eventually didn't have the time to do both and YouTube was the only thing that was working realistically so I cleared out an extra room in my mom's old house built the first real set in it and put us on the path to where we are today but now we've regained stability and people know who we are so it's time to go back for the website and one of the comments my dad made a long time ago was how much money do you make from the website Banner ad and that particular year I made $180 for the entire year to which he responded you need a product every business needs a product so we got rid of the website banner ads and we have a product now a couple of them and we can make the new site ad free because of support from all of you on the GN store our brand new gn15 metal emblem pint glass was months in the making to celebrate our 15th year in business and this website relaunch a ton of you have already bought the new glass and it's moving super fast so thank you for the support we're also selling them in combo packs with our coasters and you might also be interested in our highly functional products like the massive and heavy duty soldering and project matte these have extreme heat resistance and there are convenient tool holders spool docks and large work areas for screw tracking and even though it's comparatively large and Ultra thick as compared against other common soldering mats on the market we're selling the solder and project mat for $50 head over to store. Gamers access.net to support our website relaunch and commitment to zero thirdparty ads on the site the quick overview if you take nothing else away from the video here are the five points we'd like you to take away from it the first one is that the website is crazy fast because Wendell is a wizard it's kind of art there you go cool well my Chariot arrived but seriously if you click around the website a bit you'll notice that the pages really do load fast and there's a lot of engineering under that which wendle will explain a little bit later in the video look at the speed though these aren't lightweight text only articles either we're really going heavy on the assets and the images to try and provide value it's just optimized for example this deep cool assassin 4 article has photos for the step-by-step installation instructions and our Dan Case article has photos from every angle of the case both built and unbuilt remaining video first means we have a ton of cool visual assets so we're using those on the site coupled with Wendell's crazy loading speed to try and combine the best of written and of visual formats the second one is we have a single big page of test benches that will be automatically updated every time we add new hardware to our test platform rotation the third one is we have a really cool image quality comparison format for articles these specific p just do load javascripts but it's for the ability to zoom and compare images do side by sides access different image layers in the bottom and build your own image quality comparison so you have control over it this is awesome for comparing graphic settings and features and doing more of that it embeds some vendor agnostic code that Nvidia wrote and publicly distributed via icad Wendel took that code adapted it cleaned it up and wrote some custom code for the site to interpret the output of the tool and the result is better comparison of graphic settings the next major specific feature of the website is that it makes looking back at reviews more convenient long term and we have infinite page length so instead of a 16x9 video format we can make Mega charts when we retire a bench to show dozens of results it also means sometimes the Articles might have some extra information that got cut from the video for time finally the website has really cool article layout tools that are allowing us to build fancy article formats for special features investigative reports like our artisian builds coverage and our factory tours we haven't fully deployed these yet but we're working on it and it'll make the article reading experience a lot more engaging and informative for those pieces that are heavy with evidence or visuals let's talk about the plans and the objectives for the website so first of all this website is function first and being function first Wendell and I have been on the same page the entire time which is let's just get something sustainable live something that my team we can update on our own we can keep up with it and it's not horribly complex or this big Band-Aid together mess like the old one was where no one else knows how to use it so so we want to be able to deploy the reviews as articles and get them to people as effectively as we can so you get the charts you get the images you get the text and then anything else from that is extra and even though you written reviews they never went away there's plenty of good websites still out there but it has gotten into a much more restricted space there's not nearly as many of them which is very unfortunate uh so it's not like we're bringing them back it's again we're bringing ours back so over the next few months the big features we want to roll out as in Big Four for us for our site will include a table of contents which sounds simple but we'll talk about that uh a single collection of all of our testing methodologies Consolidated in one place we already published most of the methodology it's just scattered everywhere on YouTube and this will make it easier we also have an errors and Corrections page with error rates so that'll be cool and then we have a full feature page uh layout we're working on for we'll call it Evergreen content is YouTube's kind of keyword they use so we're also hoping to publish our end of your buyer guides and best of rounds up that roundups that kind of recap the entire year on the website soon table of content first so this is simple as a concept but the reason we kind of have to do it is because we're sticking to a single page layout so something that I really wanted to do we're excited about it and maintaining that single page format has a lot of upsides mainly it's user focused as a user it's really frustrating to hit an article and to get the one chart you care about you have to click through 37 pages to find it or spend a bunch of time trying to navigate it and then you're scrolling past 17 ads bunch of autoplay videos and all this other stuff that crashes your browser on your way to find one damn chart really frustrating so single page gets by that uh and it just reduces time waste and is better for the user there are two key downsides to doing single page so the first is already solved fortunately the first downside is assets the more images you have on the page the more stuff that's on the page that needs to look load the slower it's going to be to load and this has been resolved because the page load time is already really good the second downside is this one you can lose your place on the page if you read a piece over a couple days Point number two is the testing methodology consolidation so another major use for the website ever since we kind of abandoned the original site and went fully to video because I couldn't keep up with it the uh methodological notes ended up scattered across multiple videos all over the YouTube channel and it it's just not a good way to it's not user friendly this got especially complex with the Sound Chamber where to have the sort of full picture of how we use it you would need to watch the chamber build Vlog and then you would need to know to watch the following news episode then you'd need to know to watch the Tera review just to learn what we're doing and now from a video perspective all this made sense we didn't want to jam it all into one review for the Tera and distract from what people actually clicked for and then get penalized algorithm Al because of Abandonment but we also weren't ready to produce a full Standalone video like we've done for coolers and other things because the methods at that time weren't 100% defined they would however be defined enough to put in at least an introductory article that we could run initially and then kind of run another one when it's fully defined so that helps to resolve some of that so basically although we already published methodology pieces like our CPU Cooler test methods from the 2020 video and that's still valid today by the way made some improvements but most of it's the same and our huge GPU test methodology video also from 2020 we want to get them to where they're better surfaced it's really not Evergreen from YouTube's perspective a global platform that's not just computer hardware so the way that would behave on YouTube is it does well initially it's kind of hard to find it later and you would have to know to look for it now if you know what to search for you can get it yes but if you don't know it even exists that's the problem and YouTube is extremely good at Discovery and you know it's it's how we've gotten a lot of our views it's just from being surfaced on the recommended or sidebar but there's certain types of content that it doesn't really surface for people the website helps with a lot of that and our plan is to use the topnav on the site to make methodological posts more visible since they get buried on YouTube Full Features pages is the next one so our current test subject is the artisian builds article this one's been a lot of fun to work on Jeremy on the team has put in a massive amount of effort converting this into an article so please show your appreciation for him in the comments uh because converting it from the original investigative report into written format it was a bit of a challenge there's a lot to go through these full feature Pages we view as really critical for the website and that comes back to I guess topic kind of for another time but YouTube is particularly challenging as a platform to get factory tours documentaries things that are educational especially to really perform well it's easy for us to get an Alienware PC review to do like hundreds of thousands of views but the documentary like the evj finale those can take two months for us to put together they often involve travel they're much harder to get Distribution on and that's just because if you look at it from how YouTube Works standpoint purely objectively if you're not relying on really heavy clickbait or just things that are obnoxious for the viewer for the person navigating the website then there's limited inherent marketing potential behind a topic like the AMD lab tour the full documentary we did because you kind of lose that sudden punch that Sudden Impact you get with something that's really news heavy something like a a 5090 launching there's a lot of inherent reach with that topic CU a lot of people covered at the same time YouTube looks at this giant spread of content from from YouTubers and goes oh people care about this this is important push it all up and feed it to everyone who watches this kind of content you don't have that with these sort of Standalone special pieces and uh with the right mix of things yeah they can be made to be successful but it's so much more difficult so the website will help Elevate that content make it easier to discover and we think it'll help I mean support the views too frankly but I'm excited about just seeing it in text format related to this the homepage has a special view we're working on for showing video format versions of our top selected factory tours or documentaries we think are really worth paying attention to this is the section of the website you should check when you want something in depth and different to watch that's not an noral product review or Benchmark or part of our kind of regular Youtube upload Cadence okay now we're going to cut over to a conversation with Wendell from level one Tex to talk about some of the technology of the website I'm Wendell some certain janitorial things we needed at Gamers Nexus and so I was like yes excellent janitor time it's web janitor though yeah it turns out that uh media on the web is not dead and you're going to show them how it's done which I'm I'm on board for at least in my I don't know yeah I'm not I mean I hope we could provide good value to people I think a lot of people will like it so on the technical side for anyone who cares or is into web development the site I originally built it on jumla uh yeah I would love it if you could help give some context to people of purely on the technology like platform side you know what type of change is this jumla has its place in history but it's a little bit of a relic at at this point architecturally I mean um we've done something a little bit Unholy where the new thing is is Drupal and you know it's one of those things where it's like well you can't get there from here so I wrote a migration because Drupal actually has a lot of really good migration tools and is fairly sane under the hood when it comes to how it structures entity and how it stores content and everything else and so it wasn't a huge deal to Port all of your jumla content into uh into Drupal but like from a Content editing standpoint like that experience or like replicating that I'm just got one giant editor like I'm going to open a word processor and then I'm just going to start adding stuff in modern modern web really shouldn't be built that way actually even architecturally like Drupal like if you just if you laser focus on just like the Drupal engine it is kind of dated architecturally but it is exactly the right thing for like large scale Enterprise websites it's probably not a perfect fit architecturally for gamers Nexus but because it's open source we can adapt it and sort of use it uh in in uh in interesting ways um I think that wordpress's Gutenberg content editor is more along the lines of what a modern web editing experience should be and so we've done the Unholy thing of taking the Gutenberg editor and which is meant for WordPress but I don't I really I'm not not a fan of Wordpress for these kinds of projects so we've taken the Gutenberg editing experience and we've bolted that on top of Drupal which is just as Unholy and insane as it sounds but there is a Gutenberg project that is very well supported pretty well supported on on drupal.org and it really does make sense but at the end of the day the idea is to make it easy as possible for Content editors to paste a lot of stuff and that's what we did and just to give the viewers an idea of the level of of madness here you're taking screenshots and you paste it in you don't even bother naming a file you just paste in the screenshot and the system takes care of taking the file naming it sticking it somewhere logical and making it show up in the article but yeah I just sort of see this as like minimum Community Plumbing really to give you the platform to do to do whatever uh ironically or not ironically for the the work that I've done commercially the ones that have won the most Awards and turned the most heads are the ones that have used trole for the content management system because it also handles multilanguage really well exceptionally well okay uh but then using a headless front end so it's like counting on Drupal to render pages is too slow so you put something else in front of Drupal that takes care of caching or rendering or whatever yeah we've put a lot of work into trying to have the editor pull out as much stuff as possible in order to make the pages as fast as possible so like one of the one of the really amazing things that druple has built in is image manipulation used to be called image cache but now it's just like the image Media stuff and so when you paste in an 8 megabyte PNG unless you go out of your way Drupal will try to say let's just store that in the library of images instead of for the web let's just quietly turn that into a JPEG and make that like 300 kilobytes um it depends on what it is was sometimes that's acceptable sometimes not but the editor will help you uh convert things to web friendly image formats and compress the pages and there's some engineering under the hood to uh one of those layers that sort of sits between Drupal and the internet is taking everything and compressing it and caching it and and trying to return it as much as possible and then there's Cloud flare on top of that so like there's this whole chain of like caching policies where like when you make when you edit a page there's a thing that kicks off that actually notifies the caching thing and flare hey this page was edited uh delete it and so it'll delete it from the cach and then it'll refetch it and then and then pull it back and so that it creates the illusion of speed because everything is caching at the nth degree all the way up the chain so hopefully that'll that'll hold up right because one of the engineering goals for this um is also for ourselves so like I'm planning on relaunching level one website and we're going to have content and blah blah blah so a lot of the stuff that we have for you is stuff that we've built for ourselves we just haven't you know haven't rolled out yet and the engineering uh part of this is that it's going to evolve over time if you look at a lot of the existing Tech websites It looks like they were built they were lovingly handcrafted a lot of Blood Sweat and Tears went into it many years ago and then they've just used that from now until the end of time but this is built in such a way that it should be able to evolve and it should be able to evolve without accumulating too much cruft so you're planning to uh to bring written to level one hopefully I guess yeah a little bit a little bit more I think especially around the howtos and uh some of the um some of the industry movement stuff you mentioned the KVM so uh for anyone who's interested in that store. level one text.com and otherwise uh check out the channel as well which will link below so LEL n none of that's necessary they know where I'm at they already know uh thanks SW for all the work on the site and help with the launch next section is really short it's about how we're handling article entry for older stuff uh as we enter old content and upfit the website we are backdating things so if we go and post the uh I94 900k review on the site it's going to be backdated for the date it originally aired on YouTube and that's just because the content itself is a reflection of what was originally published so it's making it clear for everyone like hey this isn't a new review it's not new information this is what we originally ran uh here's the original date just kind of reference material or for people who would have preferred to read it originally the number one thing that we want to make sure you all know is that the goal with entering older content is to preserve the Integrity of the piece as it was originally presented hosted filmed so that means as we go back and edit reviews that are uh a week a month a year old and get them on to the website they will not be updated for our modern thoughts on it they're not going to be updated for modern pricing and availability we are preserving them as they were originally presented as a time capsule of the time in which they were published so if we grab the 3080 review we're not going to update it and say uh you know but you should also consider the 4080 cuz it didn't exist at that time and we're not using a time machine to rewrite them we're just we're preserving them as they were if we want to do a revisit though we already do those the 700xt is a good example that's how it's going to work on the website too so we're just letting you know that kind of the difference between we publish something on the site that is a newly published article but is old content uh that's how we're drawing that distinction one more example we run a piece on City skylines to benchmarks and one week later as part of the publishing Cadence we run that same piece on the website let's say there's a patch in between we the video goes up Monday patch goes out Friday article goes up Saturday we're not going to update the article to have new numbers new considerations it's a reflection a mirror of the original content piece as part of keeping this sustainable so that our small team can handle it but also just frankly making sure the videos get the views they deserve since that's driving the revenue for the site since it's ad free we will be publishing the content on the site on about a one we Delay from when the video goes up and additionally because other people on the team might be the ones entering the article even though someone else worked on the video script that means there might be some slight differences in the precise way that I might have hosted something versus the way it's written out you might just see some differences in word choice there one thing we are doing is adding to some conclusions or adding some additional content that didn't fit in the video that's because in video format we found that uh people tend to want more commentary in the conclusion in written format we've historically found that more passer by readers want firmer recommendations on what to buy at the end of a game Benchmark whereas video viewers tend to jump to a chart and just make their decision on their own on that chart we we provide both angles in the video but if you check our balers Gate 3 conclusion in the article we're trying to consolidate a lot of those mid video ad libed thoughts into one organized conclusion uh so we're continuing to add backdated articles almost daily right now check back regularly for them we're really excited about this I know like I said in the beginning but you know even though this like websites haven't gone away there's still written Publications out there uh they have definitely dwindled it's just for us it's really cool even though it's I guess it's not like new but it's exciting for me because this is where I started and um I'm I'm just I'm thrilled to be back to it and have a site that was built by an actual professional instead of instead of me like in 2008 one more thing we have thousands of articles on the website that are from the old site generation and those have been preserved they're still searchable through Google if you know what you're looking for and the old links will still work if you land on one in a YouTube video but we are going to be pulling those forward and updating them so they won't populate on the main page of the new site until we get through that process but rest assured they're still there anyway you'll see more content added regularly it's going to be either backdated or newer stuff so uh City skylines too just got converted for the website going live that's new content and that's on our closer to to current publishing Cadence so uh yeah check check the site you can go over to store. Gamers access.net if you want to support it patreon.com Gamers Nexis we're keeping the website ad free I have absolutely no intention of adding ads to the site so not going to do third party uh direct Banner sales or anything like that uh I'm pretty confident it's sustainable with the community support plus the sort of longstanding affiliate Revenue uh plus the YouTube Revenue like we we we don't need all of the we don't need all of the ad Revenue everywhere like that that's enough we can sustain it with that and have it just be a way better user experience so thanks for watching go check it out we're thrilled to hear what you think uh as I said this was function first but wend and I have already been talking about improvements if you have ideas let us know what you'd like to see we're trying to keep it really low on the feature bloat though I don't want a ton of JavaScript to slow down the site so uh but let us know what your ideas are and as we work through them maybe we'll implement it so thanks for watching see you all next timetoday we're bringing back our written article reviews in completely adree format and it's with the engineering help and Wizardry of Wendell from level one Tex some certain janitorial things were needed at Gamers Nexus in 2008 working from this 10x10 childhood bedroom I originally launched this website but now it looks like this and it's really easy to find things and fast thanks Wendell thanks Steve the website from 2008 until today has had a few makeovers but not much changed and it was extremely slow and extremely cumbersome to use in the back end and it broke a lot the new website loads Stupid Fast and it makes it really easy to see our reviews in full depth along with the videos we have image comparison tools for in-depth graphic settings analysis pieces we have detailed photo guides for cooler installation and seen every angle of the products not just in video we have tons of charts and for those of you who just want to read or just want long-term references that are way easier to find and search for after the video goes live this has what you want each review is also only one single page but there's one thing we don't have an onslaught of ads rendering the page completely unreadable and links to doctors being speechless because you won't believe you won't believe won't believe that that doesn't mean anything why would and 880,000 people Shar it on Facebook although do kind of want to learn about the Boomer skills but look how fast and clean these pages are without Those ads because our YouTube channel affiliate store and patreon revenue support us enough already we could put three ad spots there and probably no one would complain not in a meaningful way but the extra money it's not worth compromising our goal which is creating the best user experience possible we can at least start with minimizing the JavaScript and the the toe fungus ads that appear on the side of the screen thanks to the website is meant in part to be community service and that's the main reason to relaunch it because cataloging things in written format on the internet has gotten really really bad as video has killed everything and we've been a part of that we abandoned our own written content because video was the only sustainable business model but the consequence of everybody doing that is that there are a lot fewer Tech websites around with information that you can just quickly read and get your answer there's one other personal reason I wanted to read launched the website though I debated whether or not I should bother sharing this but for major Milestones like this maybe twice over the years I've been a little more open on this side so for years it's bothered me that we stopped publishing on the website specifically because that's the last part of the business that my dad really had a lot of exposure to uh where you I got to show him that part of it and he would send me texts uh shorthand of course just like read the article wow you are awesome uh so I lost him in 2015 and had to make things work pretty fast to support myself what I was trying to do and try to help you know support the family when my mom was cleaning toilets which was not enough to afford the the mortgage and some of the other medical costs but we had about one to two years of Runway to get things in order before the reserves would run out and that was when I took the clearest path possible which was investing completely in video and going forward as hard as possible with YouTube now during that time I maintained the website for a while but eventually didn't have the time to do both and YouTube was the only thing that was working realistically so I cleared out an extra room in my mom's old house built the first real set in it and put us on the path to where we are today but now we've regained stability and people know who we are so it's time to go back for the website and one of the comments my dad made a long time ago was how much money do you make from the website Banner ad and that particular year I made $180 for the entire year to which he responded you need a product every business needs a product so we got rid of the website banner ads and we have a product now a couple of them and we can make the new site ad free because of support from all of you on the GN store our brand new gn15 metal emblem pint glass was months in the making to celebrate our 15th year in business and this website relaunch a ton of you have already bought the new glass and it's moving super fast so thank you for the support we're also selling them in combo packs with our coasters and you might also be interested in our highly functional products like the massive and heavy duty soldering and project matte these have extreme heat resistance and there are convenient tool holders spool docks and large work areas for screw tracking and even though it's comparatively large and Ultra thick as compared against other common soldering mats on the market we're selling the solder and project mat for $50 head over to store. Gamers access.net to support our website relaunch and commitment to zero thirdparty ads on the site the quick overview if you take nothing else away from the video here are the five points we'd like you to take away from it the first one is that the website is crazy fast because Wendell is a wizard it's kind of art there you go cool well my Chariot arrived but seriously if you click around the website a bit you'll notice that the pages really do load fast and there's a lot of engineering under that which wendle will explain a little bit later in the video look at the speed though these aren't lightweight text only articles either we're really going heavy on the assets and the images to try and provide value it's just optimized for example this deep cool assassin 4 article has photos for the step-by-step installation instructions and our Dan Case article has photos from every angle of the case both built and unbuilt remaining video first means we have a ton of cool visual assets so we're using those on the site coupled with Wendell's crazy loading speed to try and combine the best of written and of visual formats the second one is we have a single big page of test benches that will be automatically updated every time we add new hardware to our test platform rotation the third one is we have a really cool image quality comparison format for articles these specific p just do load javascripts but it's for the ability to zoom and compare images do side by sides access different image layers in the bottom and build your own image quality comparison so you have control over it this is awesome for comparing graphic settings and features and doing more of that it embeds some vendor agnostic code that Nvidia wrote and publicly distributed via icad Wendel took that code adapted it cleaned it up and wrote some custom code for the site to interpret the output of the tool and the result is better comparison of graphic settings the next major specific feature of the website is that it makes looking back at reviews more convenient long term and we have infinite page length so instead of a 16x9 video format we can make Mega charts when we retire a bench to show dozens of results it also means sometimes the Articles might have some extra information that got cut from the video for time finally the website has really cool article layout tools that are allowing us to build fancy article formats for special features investigative reports like our artisian builds coverage and our factory tours we haven't fully deployed these yet but we're working on it and it'll make the article reading experience a lot more engaging and informative for those pieces that are heavy with evidence or visuals let's talk about the plans and the objectives for the website so first of all this website is function first and being function first Wendell and I have been on the same page the entire time which is let's just get something sustainable live something that my team we can update on our own we can keep up with it and it's not horribly complex or this big Band-Aid together mess like the old one was where no one else knows how to use it so so we want to be able to deploy the reviews as articles and get them to people as effectively as we can so you get the charts you get the images you get the text and then anything else from that is extra and even though you written reviews they never went away there's plenty of good websites still out there but it has gotten into a much more restricted space there's not nearly as many of them which is very unfortunate uh so it's not like we're bringing them back it's again we're bringing ours back so over the next few months the big features we want to roll out as in Big Four for us for our site will include a table of contents which sounds simple but we'll talk about that uh a single collection of all of our testing methodologies Consolidated in one place we already published most of the methodology it's just scattered everywhere on YouTube and this will make it easier we also have an errors and Corrections page with error rates so that'll be cool and then we have a full feature page uh layout we're working on for we'll call it Evergreen content is YouTube's kind of keyword they use so we're also hoping to publish our end of your buyer guides and best of rounds up that roundups that kind of recap the entire year on the website soon table of content first so this is simple as a concept but the reason we kind of have to do it is because we're sticking to a single page layout so something that I really wanted to do we're excited about it and maintaining that single page format has a lot of upsides mainly it's user focused as a user it's really frustrating to hit an article and to get the one chart you care about you have to click through 37 pages to find it or spend a bunch of time trying to navigate it and then you're scrolling past 17 ads bunch of autoplay videos and all this other stuff that crashes your browser on your way to find one damn chart really frustrating so single page gets by that uh and it just reduces time waste and is better for the user there are two key downsides to doing single page so the first is already solved fortunately the first downside is assets the more images you have on the page the more stuff that's on the page that needs to look load the slower it's going to be to load and this has been resolved because the page load time is already really good the second downside is this one you can lose your place on the page if you read a piece over a couple days Point number two is the testing methodology consolidation so another major use for the website ever since we kind of abandoned the original site and went fully to video because I couldn't keep up with it the uh methodological notes ended up scattered across multiple videos all over the YouTube channel and it it's just not a good way to it's not user friendly this got especially complex with the Sound Chamber where to have the sort of full picture of how we use it you would need to watch the chamber build Vlog and then you would need to know to watch the following news episode then you'd need to know to watch the Tera review just to learn what we're doing and now from a video perspective all this made sense we didn't want to jam it all into one review for the Tera and distract from what people actually clicked for and then get penalized algorithm Al because of Abandonment but we also weren't ready to produce a full Standalone video like we've done for coolers and other things because the methods at that time weren't 100% defined they would however be defined enough to put in at least an introductory article that we could run initially and then kind of run another one when it's fully defined so that helps to resolve some of that so basically although we already published methodology pieces like our CPU Cooler test methods from the 2020 video and that's still valid today by the way made some improvements but most of it's the same and our huge GPU test methodology video also from 2020 we want to get them to where they're better surfaced it's really not Evergreen from YouTube's perspective a global platform that's not just computer hardware so the way that would behave on YouTube is it does well initially it's kind of hard to find it later and you would have to know to look for it now if you know what to search for you can get it yes but if you don't know it even exists that's the problem and YouTube is extremely good at Discovery and you know it's it's how we've gotten a lot of our views it's just from being surfaced on the recommended or sidebar but there's certain types of content that it doesn't really surface for people the website helps with a lot of that and our plan is to use the topnav on the site to make methodological posts more visible since they get buried on YouTube Full Features pages is the next one so our current test subject is the artisian builds article this one's been a lot of fun to work on Jeremy on the team has put in a massive amount of effort converting this into an article so please show your appreciation for him in the comments uh because converting it from the original investigative report into written format it was a bit of a challenge there's a lot to go through these full feature Pages we view as really critical for the website and that comes back to I guess topic kind of for another time but YouTube is particularly challenging as a platform to get factory tours documentaries things that are educational especially to really perform well it's easy for us to get an Alienware PC review to do like hundreds of thousands of views but the documentary like the evj finale those can take two months for us to put together they often involve travel they're much harder to get Distribution on and that's just because if you look at it from how YouTube Works standpoint purely objectively if you're not relying on really heavy clickbait or just things that are obnoxious for the viewer for the person navigating the website then there's limited inherent marketing potential behind a topic like the AMD lab tour the full documentary we did because you kind of lose that sudden punch that Sudden Impact you get with something that's really news heavy something like a a 5090 launching there's a lot of inherent reach with that topic CU a lot of people covered at the same time YouTube looks at this giant spread of content from from YouTubers and goes oh people care about this this is important push it all up and feed it to everyone who watches this kind of content you don't have that with these sort of Standalone special pieces and uh with the right mix of things yeah they can be made to be successful but it's so much more difficult so the website will help Elevate that content make it easier to discover and we think it'll help I mean support the views too frankly but I'm excited about just seeing it in text format related to this the homepage has a special view we're working on for showing video format versions of our top selected factory tours or documentaries we think are really worth paying attention to this is the section of the website you should check when you want something in depth and different to watch that's not an noral product review or Benchmark or part of our kind of regular Youtube upload Cadence okay now we're going to cut over to a conversation with Wendell from level one Tex to talk about some of the technology of the website I'm Wendell some certain janitorial things we needed at Gamers Nexus and so I was like yes excellent janitor time it's web janitor though yeah it turns out that uh media on the web is not dead and you're going to show them how it's done which I'm I'm on board for at least in my I don't know yeah I'm not I mean I hope we could provide good value to people I think a lot of people will like it so on the technical side for anyone who cares or is into web development the site I originally built it on jumla uh yeah I would love it if you could help give some context to people of purely on the technology like platform side you know what type of change is this jumla has its place in history but it's a little bit of a relic at at this point architecturally I mean um we've done something a little bit Unholy where the new thing is is Drupal and you know it's one of those things where it's like well you can't get there from here so I wrote a migration because Drupal actually has a lot of really good migration tools and is fairly sane under the hood when it comes to how it structures entity and how it stores content and everything else and so it wasn't a huge deal to Port all of your jumla content into uh into Drupal but like from a Content editing standpoint like that experience or like replicating that I'm just got one giant editor like I'm going to open a word processor and then I'm just going to start adding stuff in modern modern web really shouldn't be built that way actually even architecturally like Drupal like if you just if you laser focus on just like the Drupal engine it is kind of dated architecturally but it is exactly the right thing for like large scale Enterprise websites it's probably not a perfect fit architecturally for gamers Nexus but because it's open source we can adapt it and sort of use it uh in in uh in interesting ways um I think that wordpress's Gutenberg content editor is more along the lines of what a modern web editing experience should be and so we've done the Unholy thing of taking the Gutenberg editor and which is meant for WordPress but I don't I really I'm not not a fan of Wordpress for these kinds of projects so we've taken the Gutenberg editing experience and we've bolted that on top of Drupal which is just as Unholy and insane as it sounds but there is a Gutenberg project that is very well supported pretty well supported on on drupal.org and it really does make sense but at the end of the day the idea is to make it easy as possible for Content editors to paste a lot of stuff and that's what we did and just to give the viewers an idea of the level of of madness here you're taking screenshots and you paste it in you don't even bother naming a file you just paste in the screenshot and the system takes care of taking the file naming it sticking it somewhere logical and making it show up in the article but yeah I just sort of see this as like minimum Community Plumbing really to give you the platform to do to do whatever uh ironically or not ironically for the the work that I've done commercially the ones that have won the most Awards and turned the most heads are the ones that have used trole for the content management system because it also handles multilanguage really well exceptionally well okay uh but then using a headless front end so it's like counting on Drupal to render pages is too slow so you put something else in front of Drupal that takes care of caching or rendering or whatever yeah we've put a lot of work into trying to have the editor pull out as much stuff as possible in order to make the pages as fast as possible so like one of the one of the really amazing things that druple has built in is image manipulation used to be called image cache but now it's just like the image Media stuff and so when you paste in an 8 megabyte PNG unless you go out of your way Drupal will try to say let's just store that in the library of images instead of for the web let's just quietly turn that into a JPEG and make that like 300 kilobytes um it depends on what it is was sometimes that's acceptable sometimes not but the editor will help you uh convert things to web friendly image formats and compress the pages and there's some engineering under the hood to uh one of those layers that sort of sits between Drupal and the internet is taking everything and compressing it and caching it and and trying to return it as much as possible and then there's Cloud flare on top of that so like there's this whole chain of like caching policies where like when you make when you edit a page there's a thing that kicks off that actually notifies the caching thing and flare hey this page was edited uh delete it and so it'll delete it from the cach and then it'll refetch it and then and then pull it back and so that it creates the illusion of speed because everything is caching at the nth degree all the way up the chain so hopefully that'll that'll hold up right because one of the engineering goals for this um is also for ourselves so like I'm planning on relaunching level one website and we're going to have content and blah blah blah so a lot of the stuff that we have for you is stuff that we've built for ourselves we just haven't you know haven't rolled out yet and the engineering uh part of this is that it's going to evolve over time if you look at a lot of the existing Tech websites It looks like they were built they were lovingly handcrafted a lot of Blood Sweat and Tears went into it many years ago and then they've just used that from now until the end of time but this is built in such a way that it should be able to evolve and it should be able to evolve without accumulating too much cruft so you're planning to uh to bring written to level one hopefully I guess yeah a little bit a little bit more I think especially around the howtos and uh some of the um some of the industry movement stuff you mentioned the KVM so uh for anyone who's interested in that store. level one text.com and otherwise uh check out the channel as well which will link below so LEL n none of that's necessary they know where I'm at they already know uh thanks SW for all the work on the site and help with the launch next section is really short it's about how we're handling article entry for older stuff uh as we enter old content and upfit the website we are backdating things so if we go and post the uh I94 900k review on the site it's going to be backdated for the date it originally aired on YouTube and that's just because the content itself is a reflection of what was originally published so it's making it clear for everyone like hey this isn't a new review it's not new information this is what we originally ran uh here's the original date just kind of reference material or for people who would have preferred to read it originally the number one thing that we want to make sure you all know is that the goal with entering older content is to preserve the Integrity of the piece as it was originally presented hosted filmed so that means as we go back and edit reviews that are uh a week a month a year old and get them on to the website they will not be updated for our modern thoughts on it they're not going to be updated for modern pricing and availability we are preserving them as they were originally presented as a time capsule of the time in which they were published so if we grab the 3080 review we're not going to update it and say uh you know but you should also consider the 4080 cuz it didn't exist at that time and we're not using a time machine to rewrite them we're just we're preserving them as they were if we want to do a revisit though we already do those the 700xt is a good example that's how it's going to work on the website too so we're just letting you know that kind of the difference between we publish something on the site that is a newly published article but is old content uh that's how we're drawing that distinction one more example we run a piece on City skylines to benchmarks and one week later as part of the publishing Cadence we run that same piece on the website let's say there's a patch in between we the video goes up Monday patch goes out Friday article goes up Saturday we're not going to update the article to have new numbers new considerations it's a reflection a mirror of the original content piece as part of keeping this sustainable so that our small team can handle it but also just frankly making sure the videos get the views they deserve since that's driving the revenue for the site since it's ad free we will be publishing the content on the site on about a one we Delay from when the video goes up and additionally because other people on the team might be the ones entering the article even though someone else worked on the video script that means there might be some slight differences in the precise way that I might have hosted something versus the way it's written out you might just see some differences in word choice there one thing we are doing is adding to some conclusions or adding some additional content that didn't fit in the video that's because in video format we found that uh people tend to want more commentary in the conclusion in written format we've historically found that more passer by readers want firmer recommendations on what to buy at the end of a game Benchmark whereas video viewers tend to jump to a chart and just make their decision on their own on that chart we we provide both angles in the video but if you check our balers Gate 3 conclusion in the article we're trying to consolidate a lot of those mid video ad libed thoughts into one organized conclusion uh so we're continuing to add backdated articles almost daily right now check back regularly for them we're really excited about this I know like I said in the beginning but you know even though this like websites haven't gone away there's still written Publications out there uh they have definitely dwindled it's just for us it's really cool even though it's I guess it's not like new but it's exciting for me because this is where I started and um I'm I'm just I'm thrilled to be back to it and have a site that was built by an actual professional instead of instead of me like in 2008 one more thing we have thousands of articles on the website that are from the old site generation and those have been preserved they're still searchable through Google if you know what you're looking for and the old links will still work if you land on one in a YouTube video but we are going to be pulling those forward and updating them so they won't populate on the main page of the new site until we get through that process but rest assured they're still there anyway you'll see more content added regularly it's going to be either backdated or newer stuff so uh City skylines too just got converted for the website going live that's new content and that's on our closer to to current publishing Cadence so uh yeah check check the site you can go over to store. Gamers access.net if you want to support it patreon.com Gamers Nexis we're keeping the website ad free I have absolutely no intention of adding ads to the site so not going to do third party uh direct Banner sales or anything like that uh I'm pretty confident it's sustainable with the community support plus the sort of longstanding affiliate Revenue uh plus the YouTube Revenue like we we we don't need all of the we don't need all of the ad Revenue everywhere like that that's enough we can sustain it with that and have it just be a way better user experience so thanks for watching go check it out we're thrilled to hear what you think uh as I said this was function first but wend and I have already been talking about improvements if you have ideas let us know what you'd like to see we're trying to keep it really low on the feature bloat though I don't want a ton of JavaScript to slow down the site so uh but let us know what your ideas are and as we work through them maybe we'll implement it so thanks for watching see you all next time\n"