The Cottage Smallholder

All,

Just letting you know that we will be placing those green underlined links in text onto the forum.

I don't think it's a big deal but I just want you to understand the rationale.

Google's rejig of its algorithms in late April hit our site traffic hard. For example, this time last year visitors were reading 10,000 pages per day. Now it's more like 3,000 on a good day. Fiona's income has dropped alarmingly as a result. It's really hurting us.

That is why we are putting so much effort into restyling the site.

Google now wants sites to load really fast in the belief that speed of presentation equals better user satisfaction, which is true.  

We have dropped the videos that used to appear beneath articles on the blog because they added a massive payload in terms of site load time. We need to replace that revenue somehow, so we have decided to place the Vibrant ads on this forum. 

You are quite free to simply ignore them as you choose. They are aimed at casual visitors and not at you, our core forumites. 

We hope you understand all this and that you don't for one moment think that we are taking advantage of our very good friends on here.

Thank you,

Danny and Fiona