The New Movie Vault Finally Launches
November 5, 2009 Posted by Tyler CruzIf you’re wondering where the hell I’ve been for the past week, it’s because we finally launched the new Movie-Vault.com on November 2nd. Unfortunately, there were a lot of technical issues that arose which required most of my time and attention.
We tested the new site on the development server over and over again, but it seems that no matter how much you prepare for a massive revamp on an existing site, there will always be issues.
It is always much easier launching a brand new site from scratch that it is revamping an existing site because you don’t have to worry about content migration and conflict with existing site mechanisms.
Five Years in the Making
While the launch of Movie-Vault.com’s massive revamp was delayed briefly, it finally got launched. This was something that I had been planning on doing for literally years – roughly 4-5 years in fact.
I just kept putting it off because I knew just how big and expensive a project it would be (the revamp cost me close to $10,000).
Check out the new and improved Movie-Vault.com for yourself and let me know what you think.
Bugs
As mentioned in my introduction, there were a number of bugs that plagued the relaunch. Most of these have been squashed and attended to, but there are still a few more scattering around in there.
The lead developer for this project is away until Monday so I’ll have to wait until next week for the rest of the bugs to be fixed. But again, most of the remaining ones are very minor.
The biggest issue was the bridged integration of the main members system with the vBulletin forum’s member system. It appears to work fine with new users, but it created quite the issue with existing forum members. The forum is currently functioning fine right now, but the integration is disabled until a better solution can be worked out.
We’re Not Done Yet!
While the new site looks complete, there is still more work to do in addition to fixing any bugs that remain.
For one, I need to update the content on the site to reflect the revamp. For example, our advertising page is out of date and I am not going to accept paid text links on the site anymore in order to aid in getting our PageRank returned (even though I don’t believe in PageRank as a useful metric) and increase the overall quality of the site.
I also need to send out a newsletter to site members to let older members who haven’t visited the site recently know about our revamp. I am waiting for all the bugs to be finished before I do this, however.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I need to round up staff again to help contribute reviews and news to the site. We once had a very active and fairly large staff which did a superb job, but after years of my neglecting the site and not giving it the attention and TLC it deserved, most of the staff moved on.
Fortunately, we have a bustling forum which will be the first source I look to. There are already members there who post their own movie reviews, so it should prove to be a good resource.
Win An Official 2-Disc Pirate Radio Soundtrack!
In part to help celebrate our relaunch, Movie Vault has partnered with Focus Features to give away 5 official 2-disc soundtracks from the upcoming film PIRATE RADIO which will be coming to theaters across the US on November 13th, 2009.
How to Enter:
To enter to win one of 5 official 2-disc soundtracks from Pirate Radio, all you have to do is:
- Follow @movievaultnews on Twitter
- Tweet the message: "I entered to win a Pirate Radio soundtrack at Movie-Vault.com"
That’s it! On November 30th, 2009 we will award 5 random winners and contact them by a private Tweet. Be sure that you stay followed to @movievaultnews and have tweeted the message above in order to be eligible.
This contest is open to US residents only, however feel free to follow us on Twitter and tweet about this contest anyways!
The Movie Vault twitter account is brand new and currently nobody has entered the contest so your chances of winning are currently 100%…
Movie Vault Interviews the Goat in The Men Who Stare at Goats
One of our staff news posters conducted an online interview with the goat in the new film The Men Who Stare at Goats.
This will be posted on the site within the next day or two.
As Movie Vault begins to grow again, so will our opportunities to deliver high quality unique content. We’ve already interviewed celebrities and film producers, etc. in the past, so it’s exciting to have a nice revamped site to feel confident to represent again.
Growth will Take Time
Movie Vault had fallen into such a downward spiral over the past 2-3 years that I know it’s going to take time to grow it into the site I know it can be. I first have to convince past staff members that it’s a site worth contributing to, in order to give the site quality and timely content again.
It will then also take time to get our site mentioned, known, and reintroduced to the film industry again and to return to the authority status we once were fortunate to have.
Anyhow, be sure to check out the new and improved Movie-Vault.com and let me know what you think.
Congrats on the launch! Looks very nice
Looks good Tyler. Good luck and hopefully it brings in some money for you!
I really like the new design and congrats on the launch. If I were to learn php how long would it take me to create something like this?
That really depends on how much you learn, how fast, etc…
Looks much better and linking structure is will in seo 😀
Yeah, I’m interested to see how the search-engine friendly URLs affect traffic in the coming months.
The site looks pretty good but one criticism I have is some of the URLs are not as SEO-friendly as they could be. For example:
http://www.movie-vault.com/reviewed-by/scott-s./pageNum=10&totalRows=163/
First, that URL is several directories deep from the root. The further from the root you go, the less important it is seen by search engines. E.g., http://www.domain.com/article.html is more important than http://www.domain.com/articles/funny/recent/a/article.html.
Second, there is no need whatsoever to have actual variables being presented as though they are directories and the totalRows=163 shouldn’t be in the URL at all. It should be formatted something along the lines of:
http://www.movie-vault.com/reviewed-by/scott-s./10/
or:
http://www.movie-vault.com/scott-s./10/
The actual logic for calculating offsets for pagination should be done in the PHP script, not being passed via $_GET and mod_rewrite.
Yes, I agree. I will probably be getting the developers to improve the link structure a bit. It’s pretty good right now, but as you say there are some needlessly long ones that could probably be shortened by close to half their current length.
Shouldn’t the tweet be “I entered to win a Pirate Radio soundtrack at http://www.movie-vault.com/” so more backlinks and traffic
@jam It’s more than likely it would be shortened anyway using bit.ly. Would help traffic but not backlinks.
@Chris Robbins
Nope it fits perfectly
He means that some applications that allow you to post urls AUTOMATICALLY change it to a bit.ly, tinyurl or is.gd link by default and many people don’t switch this automation off, totally destroying any backlinks.
That’s looking really superb right now. I am sure you will have great success and profits running Movie Vault.
Hey Tyler, great, i followed the whole movie-vault update the last weeks.
I think the standard article page (movie review) could be improved, e.g. there are no movie images, there is no direct commenting (only a general link to the forums) and i think the amazon merchandise should be implemented per amazon api, not just via a simple banner.
keep up the great work!
best wishes from hamburg!
Thanks for your suggestions.
The movie review pages are actually programmed and set up to display images inline in the post as well as show photos and wallpaper within an AJAX carousel at the bottom of the page. We just don’t have any photos or wallpaper added on most reviews yet, but I hope to see them added to new reviews from now on.
Commenting on news posts is something that will probably be implemented in the future, but I won’t be adding commenting on movie reviews – I want that to be done on our forum for a much more organized and unified feel.
Lastly, the Amazon API is something I’m also going to look into in the future. The widget I’m using currently is generally pretty good at displaying related DVD’s and Blu-Ray’s however.
I’m sure it’s doable to have each new review create a thread in the forum, and then each post in the forum is relayed back to the review as a comment, no?
Not sure how easy that’d be, but it must be possible, and it’d be awesome.
Then you could do the same for news as well.
congratulations to the launch of movie vault, it is looks so great and good luck into it.
Movie-vault is getting even better, I like how you feature movies. Pictures are very big and I also like the freebies!
Good luck tyler!
It looks really good..
Ill keep an eye out for the interview
Just visited movie vault. It looks great and it is very is to navigate. Ps. I love the color scheme.
Looks great Tyler! I always like reading your blog because your not only a marketer but a website developer as well and the dedication put towards this site is awesome! Keep up the good work! Its really cool!
Site looks good, but you really need to get those bugs worked out! 😛
The redesign looks great Tyler. It must be a relief to finally launch it. At the same time, it’s good that you realize that there is still a lot of work in front of you to take it to the next level. Good luck with the marketing.
Great news, Tyler. It looks good, and best of luck with it. I know it took time, money and a lot of personal effort, but this is a real build for the future property … people will still be movie fanatics even when you’re as old as I am, and Hollywood and thousands of others will stil be paying a fortune to advertise them. Good on you.
Unfortunately, the online film entertainment industry, in terms of advertising anyway, doesn’t pay nearly as well as you’d think.
The site looks fantastic Tyler, I’m sure it will return to and surpass it’s former glory. Great to see you developing web projects again, all that affiliate marketing stuff was doing my head in!
AWESOME REVAMP! GREAT JOB!
Mike
Very nice design. Good job!
I say good luck man.. Can’t wait to see how it would fare after a year or so..
So do they write the movie reviews for you? For free?!?!?
So, Tyler, what is your next BIG project? Would love to hear about it.
And is pokerforums.org slowly dying or becoming less popular? I only ask because today only 22 members have visited the site and you only have 262 active members. That’s doesn’t sound like a lot… plus price drops in advertising rates tell us you must have hit a dry spell in terms of finding advertisers…?
Yes, all the staff are volunteers.
My next big project is the robot fighting Flash-based game that I have been posting about the past couple of weeks.
Regarding PokerForums – yes, it has been going in very slow downwards spiral over the past couple of years, just like Movie Vault did. That’s the problem with having too many sites – once you focus your time and energy on one, the others suffer. Then again, it never helped for the UIGEA bill to pass in legislation a few years back. Hopefully the democrats will attend to that soon… but I don’t think it’s high on their agenda.
Really happy to see the new Movie Vault website =D It’s great to finally see it come to life =D
Till then,
Jean
perfect .. i will really enjoy my empty time to browser your movie site…great.. congrats tyler
The site looks really good. Congrats on getting your project completed. Thanks Greg Ellison
The new site just looks amazing!
Cool! Congrats on your launch of your movie site Tyler, the design looks very cool! 🙂
Regards,
Lee
Sure is exciting as well as inspiring. If I ever saved up to have 10 grand, I don’t know if I could risk investing it in my own company. Sure could payoff 100 fold though, so best of luck!
-Jack
That really depends on how much you learn, how fast, etc…
It looks really great..
Looks good Tyler. Good luck and hopefully it brings in some money for you!
Congrats on the launch! Looks very nice
That site look’s great 🙂
Best of luck for that 😛
Ill keep an eye out for the interview
That really depends on how much you learn, how fast, etc…
Till then yeah
Congrats on the launch! Looks very nice
this web site is looking verg nice.
Hi Tyler
Very beautiful and function Thanks…
how did you make money on Movie-vault?
and it seems to be a good website..
nice and congratulations…
Time for an update please! How is the Vault progressing after its relaunch?
That’s looking really superb right now. 😉