I’m at the CES show and that means plenty of technology stories to talk about (although it seemed a bit quiet on the first day), but I thought I should update you on the thinking behind the move to the Display Daily website and away from Display Central.
One of the key reasons was that Display Central was designed in the time when PCs were the main way to access content, so it really didn’t work on tablets and smartphones. The new website is a “responsive” design and changes its layout according to the display being used, so I hope you will enjoy it on your tablet, especially.
A second factor is that since taking over the Display Central website, we have only had a small number of negative comments from readers and subscribers, but almost all of them have been about the “paywall”. Readers without a subscription didn’t like to click on stories, only to find that they couldn’t access them.
The economic realities are that, without our paid subscribers (who have access to many more stories and, especially, some really great event reports from around the world), we couldn’t continue to run the site.
The new site is designed so that all the content on the Display Daily menu and the home page are free to view, so Display Daily readers will not have the irritation of being unable to see stories that are listed there. There are additional menu items for our Large Display Monitor and Mobile Display Monitor subscribers to allow them to see their premium content. At the moment, we are allowing Display Daily readers to see just the headlines for these sections.
We have added a “tagging” system, to allow you to follow a particular topic of interest. However, that system will show articles that are available to both groups, so if you use the tags, you may find that you can’t see anything but headlines. Of course, subscribers to one or both of our newsletters will also see the articles in their subscriptions, without restriction.
Finally, we have moved all the user details over from the Display Central website, so you won’t need to re-register. However, we can’t move your “cookies” which perform the “auto login” function, so if you need a reminder of your username or password, just use the button at the top right. 
I welcome comments on the changes and feedback on the new site. We will leave the old site in place and have some plans to build a significant archive of content as an extra feature.
Bob
