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As we celebrate our seventeenth anniversary (the site officially launched December 25th, 1998, when some of our staff were still in elementary school) I’d like to wish each and every one of our visitors a very Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays/Season’s Greetings/Merry Festivus* (*delete as required). It’s been a busy year here at DPReview, with our first live event, PIX 2015, which brought an amazing collection of photographers together in Seattle for two days of inspiring talks and demos, whilst also giving us a new appreciation for the sheer amount of work that goes into putting on an expo. You watch all the videos from the show – onstage and off – at the PIX2015.com/videos.
I’m incredibly proud of the work the team did this year. 2015 was the year we went big on video content, sending Barney off on adventures that took him from the Arctic Circle to Mexico for our new field tests (which he assures me was nowhere near as glamorous as it sounds). If you’ve not had chance to watch them I’d definitely recommend you head over to our YouTube channel to check them out. It’s not like there’s much else to do over the next few days, right?
Behind the scenes we’ve been working hard to update the aging content management system that runs dpreview, something that will finally allow us to start work on the site redesign that’s been sort-of-planned now for about 5 years. We hope to be able to share some of the changes with you early in the year (and get your feedback), and to start rolling out the new design towards the end of 2016. And don’t worry – if you like your DPReview just the way it is, you’ll be able to keep it (right now the most common complaint from new users is the black background / white text, but we know there’s enough of you who like it fine the way it is that we’ll offer the option to switch back to the old style). We plan to overhaul user galleries and Challenges too, but that probably won’t happen until 2017. Or 2018. Certainly before we hit our 20th anniversary.
Our other big priority for 2016 is to improve our reviewing processes so we can produce more camera, lens and accessory reviews. The camera market has seen significant changes over the last couple of years, with the death of the point and shoot market forcing manufacturers to concentrate on their high-end enthusiast products. This is great news for photographers, but has resulted in our in-depth reviews taking longer and longer as we devise new tests and dive even deeper to fully assess the performance of what can only be described as the most advanced and capable photographic tools ever developed for the enthusiast and professional.
I’m convinced we’re doing the best, most comprehensive, most photographically relevant camera reviews we’ve ever done, but we hear your feedback – you want more reviews, more quickly. And that means we need to fundamentally overhaul the process. We’ve already started, and I sincerely hope you’ll notice a significant increase in the volume of reviews we publish once we’ve implemented all our plans. Who knows, maybe we’ll beat 2015’s record three positive feedback messages (vs several thousand telling us exactly where we should stick our website/review/forum ban)…
And so, since my family is getting tired of waiting for me to stop working and drink some egg-nog I will leave you to enjoy the holidays, take some great pictures and maybe take a break between courses to visit our comments section and tell us how wrong we are about everything 🙂
Merry Christmas!
Simon
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